


what if the storm ends

by SecretReyloTrash (BadOldWest)



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: 1950's when they're adults, Alternate Universe - WWII, Alternate Universe: London, Alternate Universe: Postwar, Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Author Rey, Ben Solo: Grudge Holder, Childhood Friends, Eventual Smut, F/M, First Time, Flashbacks, Grief, Loss of Virginity, Non-Linear Narrative, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Reconciliation, Rey is a mess, Slow Burn, Unprotected Sex, Widower Ben, Widower Ben means Ben had a happy marriage to someone else so if you're not into that, Yorkshire Dales, pregnancy mention
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-05
Updated: 2020-07-19
Packaged: 2021-03-01 02:47:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 61,957
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23497750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BadOldWest/pseuds/SecretReyloTrash
Summary: As a child, Rey is evacuated from London to the Yorkshire Dales during the Blitz. She spends the war in the care of the Solos on their farm, wandering the moors with their son looking for a legendary family artifact long lost. When the war is over, she returns to a city she no longer recognizes, and she writes a popular series of children's fantasy books based on her childhood in the Dales. After amassing fame and fortune with her stories, tragedy brings her back to the farm to see Ben Solo, once her greatest inspiration and now a widower.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 460
Kudos: 873





	1. Chapter 1

_What if this storm ends?_

_And I don't see you_

_As you are now_

_Ever again_

* * *

Her arms are either far too skinny or her arms are far too short to retrieve the apple from Ben’s grip. Longer arms could reach and stronger arms could actually do some damage if she socked a fist into his belly when he dangled the fruit over her head. But Ben had height, and Rey had neither, so they were at a standstill shoving against each other in the doorway leading out the kitchen. 

“Children!”

Leia always used that phrase, _children,_ as Rey and Ben were a unit. Rey liked that, it was not “my son and Rey: a nobody,” they were lumped together to mean the same, even when they were in trouble. 

Han scarcely looked up from his newspaper.

“Ben, let her have it.”

Leia was more pragmatic:

“Rey, give it up, there’s more apples in the bowl.”

It wasn’t about having _an_ apple, it was a matter of principle, and Ben had taken the apple straight out of her hands like he could just take whatever he wanted. 

She leapt with her next grab, and while she didn’t secure the apple, she was able to drag Ben’s arm down into her grasp and twist his hand closer. 

Rey and Ben did not fight to wound: they fought to destroy.

“What’s all this about a hunt in the moors this afternoon? I thought you two were finally working together,” Han tried instead.

This did not succeed in tearing apart the battle in the door. Rey did manage to lock her hold on Ben long enough to twist towards Han and declare:

“We’re looking for a sword!”

And then she shoved her shoulder back into Ben’s chest as hard as she could. 

“My _grandfather’s_ sword,” Ben said grandly, even breathless from the shove, with intense feeling.

Leia cut the grandeur of the moment with a snort and a roll of her eyes.

“That’ll show the Krauts,” Han replied dryly, not lifting his eyes from the paper. Rey blinked at Han’s confident and somewhat brazen acknowledgement of the war going on. He didn’t do it often, which Rey was sure had something to do with the fact that the American was the only man his age, the only father, she had come across living at home and reading the newspaper as if everything was fine. 

“Ben!” Leia lobbed an apple across the kitchen at her son, which he caught without even flinching in his free hand. Obviously one was to be distributed to Rey.

Somehow sensing its value, Ben dropped Rey’s original apple back into her hands with a dismissive shove. They were all at once tangled, wrestling like kittens, and now separated as he was disinterested again. His shifts in mood were always difficult to navigate. But she would keep at learning him because he was the most interesting person she had ever met. Better than a character in any book.

If Ben's soul had a color, it would be black, but it would be black velvet. Or something else soft. It had to be soft but dark. Satisfaction buzzed through her when she stumbled upon something accurate. The proper use of the word nebulous last week had her grinning ear to ear at her own cleverness.

He was very complicated: predicting his reactions and moods became as satisfying as solving a puzzle. 

The sun warmed her neck and cheeks in the light coming in from the kitchen window. In the city it was common for the light to have bounced off of thirty different surfaces before falling upon her shoulders. This impossibility of direct heat was always stirring to her. She could lie out in a patch of sunlight for hours. 

“Be careful on the cliffs,” Leia looked none too happy with these plans, but also withheld the declaration that they would not go out at all because she could not easily enforce it. Leia was the busiest woman Rey had ever met. “That sword is nothing but an old legend so you had best not break your necks looking for a story.”

Ben took a lush bite out of the flesh of his apple and swung open the door leading out to the grassy yard. His free hand waved at his mother and seemed to dismiss her warning.

_“And stay out of the Abbey!”_

He kept on like he hadn’t even heard his mother: which was a joke in itself because her voice travelled far.

Han chuckled to himself and Rey heard the word that would lock in her and never leave it:

“Stuck on that mighty Skywalker legend.”

* * *

_“This sword, it belongs to me!” Ben bellowed, his eyes glowing with red fire, as he lowered the blade from the ever-twisting clouds of smoke and tilted it threateningly into Rey’s face._

_Her face was covered in tears for her friend. They had come so far together, but now, the sword they had found would cleave them apart, forever walking a separate path. There had to be something she could say to stop him._

_“Don’t do this. Please don’t go this way.”_

Rey closed the book with a satisfying snap. Saying goodbye to Ben was always easier with the firmness of a hardcover to slam shut between them. 

She always felt a little wistfully deflated after reading from the books: somehow both so familiar and yet distant. It was as if she existed on two planets: only one of them had a sun. The transition of being passed back and forth was abrupt. She could see a glare, sometimes, from where her words differed from reality, a world between the world that was and the one she wrote. When she looked at it and didn’t recognize the farm from her own story, she was embittered. 

It irked her to not have it right, to come so close to capturing it, and then seeing it as a point in the distance that just smudged when she got closer.

But this afternoon she shook it off: for those memories always took away from the reading that such a kind audience had gathered here to enjoy it. The air around her just felt a little colder, that was all. 

She wrote the books because she was fond of these memories, of course, now that the war was behind everyone. This bookstore where they had gathered had once been a bakery, rebuilt without a single original brick left to mortar together. New things could be made of old: and her time during evacuation of the city spent with the old expat Han Solo and his mysterious wife Leia, and their boy, Ben, were her story now. 

She blushed at the realization, coming round to the polite clapping filling the room, that she had become so lost in her own writing. She smoothed her skirt and laughed, mocking a polite curtsy, and was somewhat remiss to realize no one had even noticed her state of reverie at all. 

* * *

“When we find it, I’ll let you hold it.”

Rey glowered at him.

“We’re both _looking,_ we’re obviously both going to share it.”

“No. Finders keepers.”

_“Ben!”_

Rey was near tears. It wasn’t fair if she was helping him if he’d hoard it all for himself. Ben was silent, seeming to know that he had gone too far in his selfishness. But the boy was never good at apologies. Silently, without looking at her, he slid something wrapped in a napkin out of his pocket and stuffed it in the front pocket of Rey’s overalls. 

Then, without another word, he turned and jogged up the steep hill to the Abbey. His long legs took him further than Rey’s could, and though usually she yelled at him to wait, instead she let him dash off and opened the parcel he gave her.

Two cookies were wrapped in the paper, just barely flecking crumbs off the edges. With sugar rations, it was clear he’d been saving them: Rey could raid that kitchen for sweets with the effectiveness of a bloodhound, and she hadn’t sensed anything in days.

She couldn’t hold back her smile as she held one of the cookies between her teeth, jogging to catch up with Ben from the base of that hill. The roofless arches of the Abbey stretched impossibly high into the blue sky: the only thing left of this holy temple was the natural world itself filling in the cracks. Weeds carpeted the earth at its floor, birds the only parishioners outside of two troublesome children who sat on the stone arches in utter ignorance of where these ancient stones might fall. 

Ben would be searching the walls for clues on where the sword was by the time she got there. She kept herself from biting down just yet as she made her way up.

He had given her two cookies. But she’d share with him when she got there. Then they’d each have one, and eat them together.

* * *

_“When does Rey kiss Ben?”_

There was a gap in the teeth of the asker’s mouth that manipulated some of the sounds of the question. A lost tooth of a little girl who just wanted to know when, in this sprawling tale of magic and swords, the kissing would start.

Rey sucked in a short little breath at the question. She folded her hands on the table in front of her. 

Using their real names had led to all sorts of messy questions like this.

 _“Well,”_ Rey smiled and took a slow breath, exaggerated enough that everyone in the room chuckled politely at her dramatic pause, “obviously, at this point in the story, they are not quite friends now. That would be what they have to work on first, before any kissing.”

“Don’t have to be _friends_ to kiss,” an older woman in the front row pointed out, with a raucous tone of someone who knew this wisdom from intimate experience, and the cheek of it all had the room unraveling with laughter.

Rey’s hands twisted in her lap and her face turned redder than she’d like it to. She wasn’t _opposed_ to kissing. The response just caught her off guard, and made her feel foolish for a moment. Like she was caught seeing things in her own single way once more: a barn that was always red turning green in her memory.

“Well, why, yes,” she coughed a little. “I suppose that’s true.”

She kept her smile plastered on to the audience filling the shop and signaled for another question.

“Where would you say Rey and Ben’s relationship is now?”

She would much rather be writing alone in her flat forever, sliding pages under the door to earn food, than having to face these admittedly very stupid personal decisions she made about her books. But her publisher, after a frighteningly small first advance, _loved her_ once the books miraculously flew off the shelves. She had to be an uncomfortable face for the books: she longed to be a reclusive author, but that didn’t seem possible anymore when her starry-eyed excitement over being a real author had caused her to agree to these small indulgences in celebrity. 

She smiled gamely, tucking her hair behind her ears. Back to the coy game. 

“I suppose we know where they are now. In different worlds, and very convinced they must destroy each other,” she lowered her voice dramatically, “so we shall have to wait until the next book to see.”

There was a pleasant rumble of groans throughout the shop. But this was the frustration of an audience in the palm of her hand. She said it with confidence because they would be reading to find out no matter what she said: their reaction was confirmation of that.

They would wait for _her._

Everyone wanted to be around her. Nobody wanted her to leave.

* * *

The last time she ever saw Leia, there was some party for the release of her second book that she attended, and afterward they had gone to a cafe together in Holborn. In this part of London the neighborhoods had once been so crisply parceled up, one immediately knew as they stepped onto a street where the slice that divided Bloomsbury from Holborn and Covent Garden from the rest was. 

A city was like a body. A body was legs and arms and a head. Essential parts with functions. Ever since she had come back to it, at the end of the war, London had felt like a corpse. A skeleton was just a skeleton. Just bones. 

After the Blitz it was bright but wan in these areas. If the city had been sliced up like a cake before the war: now all the pieces were crumbling. There was an airiness around them that bleached the stone buildings white as bone. Rey remembered that distinct light, and Leia’s hair looked more silver than brown with it coming in through the windows. There was a lengthy five-minute conversation about tile work on the floor that Rey could remember almost every word of years later, but not something about how Rey was missed that had squeezed her heart very surely in the moment. It was the cursed memory of a writer: that Rey should constantly remember details, but not know what they were supposed to mean.

It would be the last time she saw Leia: and Rey would never forgive herself for not burning more details into brain in the moment that would never come back again.

But as it was still happening, Leia held her hands, her skin feeling like paper against Rey’s, and smiled a pained smile. Her eyes were soft and apologetic.

“I do have some happy news,” Leia broke their hold and leaned back in her seat. If the news was indeed happy, it was odd that Leia kept a tone like she needed to break it gently as she was stirring her tea, “Ben’s getting married.”

Rey smiled radiantly with happiness for Ben. She toasted their afternoon tea in his honor and asked a million questions all while Leia prattled on about the very little she admitted to knowing about his bride. They clinked their teacups together and talked about grandchildren and life coming back to the farm and wouldn’t Han have been pleased, hopefully a boy, and soon, and wishing he could see it. 

It was happy news. That Ben was adored. That Rey had not ruined his life with her silly book about when they were children. He would wear his villainy like a stain: or she had always assumed he would. She was relieved of guilt for thinking his loneliness was her fault. What more could she ask for?

This would be the last time she saw Leia and she couldn't _listen,_ a ringing in her ears, and it wrenched every precious moment out of her mind. 

Rey smiled and carried on, and could not understand why on the train home alone she felt utterly hollow, and when she got into the bath that night, she cried until the water in the tub tasted of salt. 

It wasn’t fair of her to cry. Ben had a life that stretched on before him, and he couldn’t exist forever as a character in her books. No matter how perfectly she remembered the details of sunny breakfasts where he ate toast so painfully slowly and wrote them down with every specificity noted: it did not bring them back. They would not exist ever again, at least not for her. 

This was nonsense. He wasn’t _dying._ In three months time he would be crunching at a glacial pace in a kitchen with his wife. 

These were merely things that were not for Rey to see and yet were impossible to unsee. 

This was a happy thing: and Rey could not explain why it made her feel afraid. 

* * *

“You can’t leave.”

Rey didn’t have a choice. She roughly wiped her face off with the back of her hand, only managing to smear snot and tears across her chin, and glared over her shoulder at Ben. 

“I have to.”

He stood in the doorway of the attic room she had been kept safe in for years now with his arms crossed. Unimpressed with her answer. Was he going to be truly awful, come over and pull on her braids casually, and lie and act like she'd ever be able to see them again?

Rey was too stunned to fight it. She had always expected the war would never end. That she’d grow old in this room. That there was no life for her back in London. 

But now the war was over. And she had to leave. 

“You can’t go.”

The floorboards creaked as he moved closer, leaning over her suitcase as though for a moment he was going to tear all of her possessions out of it to keep her here.

Rey just cried harder, a horrible mess on her face.

“Don’t make this harder.”

“You don’t have any family. There’s nothing for you there.”

As if she needed to be reminded of this _now._

“And yet when your parents are told I’m to go back, I’m going back,” she snapped at him tightly, “everything goes back to the way it was. Am I supposed to beg them to want me, then?”

In the years she had spent here, he had at some point learned to stop looking away from her when they argued. It used to be because she knew him too well and would drag the truth from his eyes like a fish from the sea. Now it was more confident. He led with what he knew to be true. It was a skill he mastered over time, and a skill that might destroy her now. 

He knew there was no family for her but this one: and it was still turning her out.

His eyes stayed on hers:

“You belong here.”

Just because it was true, or fair, didn’t mean it would happen. Rey had spent a short life learning that.

“I can’t make them keep me, Ben. It’s done. It’s over. I can’t spend the rest of my life playing with you. And I can start school soon.”

Something to be excited for, at least, at least hopeful—

Ben grabbed her hand. Both of them together, tan and pale skin entwined with tight fingers, were filthy. Dirt under their nails, little cuts from thorns and tumbles, calluses abound. 

These were not the hands of a _somebody._ But Ben and Rey’s hands looked the same together.

Leia had given maybe the greatest gift in the wake of this tragedy: school, a good school, where Rey could better herself now that the war was over. It was easy to focus on the pain of leaving. But pretending the Solos did this to her just to be cruel was a childish way to look at it. 

It was just that she was their charity, and always had been.

“Stop trying to be a grown-up about this.”

His eyes searched hers intently. He didn’t even seem to notice the mess all over her face. Since the news had been announced this afternoon Rey hadn’t been able to stop crying. In the morning her awful guardian would arrive to bring her home to London. 

_Don’t remind me I’m still a child._

She was stunned to see Ben so angry. Shouldn’t he be happy to not have to share half of everything with her? 

But she could see now everything they were to each other: it was always them against the adults. Ben was getting too old to think that way. He was closer to that doomed fate than she, melting his childish features into manhood every day, the awkwardness honing down to more defined features. 

He warned her of a fate that was slowly overtaking him no matter how hard he fought it. 

“There’s so much we haven’t done yet,” he wet his lips, squeezing his thumb against the cradle of her palm, “and you promised…”

Promises she wasn’t ready for.

Rey stared up at him mutely. Was he giving her a day to keep them?

She didn’t feel like she could. It was all a grand game, and suddenly, he was asking her to know this place in the world and have it be with him? How could one thing be both right and wrong all at the same time?

“Don’t say goodbye,” he said, instead of reminding her of her promises, “I won’t hear it.”

Tears slid down her cheeks. 

“You won’t even say goodbye to me?”

It devastated her to think about. 

He was already leaving her, the floor creaking as he vanished down the attic stairs. When she went down for dinner Leia and Han sadly informed her that he tore off for the moors without a word. No one knew where he hid for the evening: Han’s search after it grew dark came up empty, but they were all sure that he would appear just in time to see Rey off. 

He didn’t appear. At least not in time for the car to take her to the station.

That’s where the dream that they could travel the moors together forever began. She gave herself only an hour to cry on the train ride to King’s Cross before she picked up a pen and began to write it.

* * *

“Child,” said the Lion, “I am telling you your story, not hers. No one is told any story but their own.”

_-The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis_


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so this is definitely the chapter were the "falling out" cements: but keep in mind the timeline means there are things that can proceed the events that lead to their feelings of bitterness that are yet to be revealed. Especially Rey.

_ The perfect halo _

_ Of gold hair and lightning _

_ Sets you off against _

_ The planet's last dance _

* * *

Rey was surprised to find a familiar face at the reading. Critically she was popular, at least her books were, but Rey was rather without friends in her life in the city. 

There were many faces surrounding her; but few of them she was able to recognize at a glance. Blank masks of life humming like a swarm of locusts.

When a young woman approached her at the end of her reading, she assumed it was an overexcited reader wanting a book signed from the shaky exuberance of their greeting. Knowing she need not approach, she  _ will be _ approached, and to just wait and listen. This was the time when programs were crumpled up under empty seats, and people lingered to outpour affections Rey didn’t know how to return. 

But it was not a stranger but  _ Rose _ trembling in anticipation in her teal coat, face lighting up under her hat, and Rey almost wept with happiness to see her again. She never expected anyone known to be here. Not since Leia came down for the release of her first book. 

Rose opened her arms and they embraced in the empty bookshop, with all of the attendants of the reading filtering out slowly. Rey let go the image of the spinsterly lady author that was so easy to veil herself in these days and laughed giddily, as if they were girls again. 

“What brings you to London?”

“I’m engaged!” Rose had not yet released her from the hug and began to jump up and down in Rey’s arms. “I’m going to a bridal salon tomorrow and asked around about you. Our local celebrity!”

“Rose!” Rey’s arms tightened.  _ Everyone’s getting married, _ she thought to herself in a moment of terror, and then blinked in surprise, because there was only one other person she knew of and it still felt like everyone. “We have to celebrate. Do you have any engagements this evening?”

“Rey, you make it sound like I have a social secretary! I was going to see what you were up to, you goose. Unless you’re busy?”

“No,” Rey faltered, that feeling where the words floated out for how this looked in her head deflated and sank onto the floor from how silly they looked exposed to the air of reality. “I’d love for us to catch up.” 

Rose didn’t seem to notice the awkwardness in Rey’s invitation. She took Rey’s arm easily and linked their elbows, and Rey stood much straighter with the confidence that this gave her.

To not have to walk on the street alone was a rare luxury. 

“We can get cocktails, just us girls, and if anyone bothers us I’ll jam him with my elbow and we’ll go running,” Rose giggled, “At least, I had to promise my fiancé that.”

* * *

The lush, soft grasses on the hill, with the stretch of bright sky overhead, were the closest thing Rey had to lying on a cloud. It was the perfect spot of daydreaming:

“Do you think finding the sword will make us kings?”

Ben, lying beside her, was her anchor to reality.

“No.”

She fluttered her eyes in the sun to squint at him. He was laid back and resting in the cradle of earth. He didn’t even have to think about his answer. Quick answers always lacked imagination. 

“But The Lady of the Lake…”

“We never saw any Lady of the Lake. It’s not Excalibur.”

She rolled over onto her side. 

“How do you know so much about it? Leia and Han won’t tell me anything.”

Learning the bounds of their annoyance had been like exercising a muscle. Rey was tentative at first: if not trained to have good manners, at least reserved enough to try not to act with bad ones. The more Han fought conformity in his manners, the more Rey learned that etiquette was not an enforced matter in this house. Eventually her enthusiasm won out: even when Han shielded himself with his newspaper and Leia hid behind whatever it was she was doing in the office, she pestered them constantly about the Skywalker Sword.

They were very generous with her and never grew crosser than could be forgiven: but the matter of the sword was where they would not relay any further information. 

“Han married into this crazy family and doesn’t want to know. I only know what my Uncle told me.”

“Which is?”

He cracked an eye open. While Rey rolled around and fidgeted: he always lay perfectly still. She was somehow on her belly now, completely twisted around from where she had flopped onto her back, braiding long strands of grass together.

“It was passed on generation through generation and my Grandfather lost it somewhere in the moors.”

Rey laughed. It was a rather silly story. Merely misplacing an ancient sword. 

Leia expressed wariness of all the time the two of them spent out of doors together. Perhaps it was because whenever they were stuck inside the house it was likely that they’d kill each other. Ben’s parents didn’t see how that violence faded away when Ben had fresh air to breathe.

_ “I think they speak a language all their own out there,” _ she once overheard Leia worry aloud to Han, who merely chuckled in response. 

_ “And why should we deprive our son of such a friend?” _

“If I were king of all England,” she began grandly, “I would end the war.  _ With _ the sword.”

“That’s what you’d do with your turn?”

She raised her eyebrows. Ben just kept looking at her, half-amused, half-serious.

“When you aren’t using it,” she agreed, “and what would you do with it?”

Ben blinked thoughtfully up at the clouds. 

“I don’t know.”

And from that sprung a question she spent her life trying to answer for him.

* * *

Rey wasn’t personally familiar with any bars in London that hadn’t hosted the occasional cocktail party for her publisher that she was more than obligated to attend, so she had no comfortable option to bring Rose to. 

But she picked one off the top of her head that had hosted such events over near Leicester Square, which was bustling with the pre-theater crowd. Stepping inside she realized that this was a more glamorous occasion than she had intended for a drink between friends, her gesture of bringing Rose now seeming ostentatious. Self-consciously, she handed her coat off at the check and watched as Rose blinked, taking in the high ceiling, the stained-glass windows, and the stone facades.

Rey was about to offer to take her to a quieter pub, but Rose ended her unease quickly: 

“I’m glad it lasted through the war.”

Saying such things out loud these days was a bit out of turn in London: like observing the people who outlived those that were in the coffin at a funeral. 

Rose’s face contained a reverence that made Rey feel like she had taken her to the National Gallery a block over. Flashy or not, Rose was just happy to be here. 

So Rey took up Rose’s elbow again as the host led them to a high table next to a potted palm. 

Service was prompt. 

“Gin and Cola,” Rose said to the waiter who appeared within a blink of an eye, her feet swinging from the high stool. 

“Martini,” Rey added, though she always hated them. They were just easy to ask for and she’d drank enough to know what she was getting. She hadn’t a lot of opportunities to try other drinks and always felt rushed into choosing one, so she chose by a name she remembered quickly to save herself the risk of getting something worse. 

As the waiter walked away with their cocktail orders, Rey had a sneaking suspicion when the bartender looked over at them he recognized her from a party she’d attended here where, not able to overcome her nerves, she spent the evening eating olives across the bar from him. 

There was a creeping smile across his face in recognition as she looked back. 

They would at least get their drinks quickly.

Immediately, it would turn out.

“Gin and Cola,” the waiter said, not making eye contact with either of them, Rey assumed because the second drink was not a martini, “and a Gin and Daisy, compliments from the bar.”

Rey wrinkled her nose. The cheek of it all. 

_ “Ooh, _ what’s in it?” Rose raised her eyebrows at Rey like they were flirting with boys through the fence at school. 

“Grenadine, lemon, and gin…”

She’d rather have a martini.

“Thanks,” Rey said, and toasted towards the bartender to be polite. She then leaned closer to Rose without drinking it to signal she wanted privacy.

“Of all the nerve...”

Rose laughed into her Gin and Cola. “I was kidding when I said we would elbow all the men away from us. We could pick someone up for you.”

“I have no interest in _ —what?” _

Rose was barely containing a giggle. 

“Rey, you’re such a schoolmarm. Unless you don’t want to make someone else jealous.”

“No,” Rey shook her head automatically, though realizing for her age, she should stop demurring these kinds of questions. One needed a better reason to not be seeing anyone, even casually, than genuine disinterest. This was something Rey frankly never understood, but no one took her lack of interest as a good enough one to be alone when she was successful. 

But Rose didn’t look like she needed an excuse from Rey: but just wanted to know what was on her friend’s mind.

“Why, then?”

Rey sighed.

“More time for writing,” she shrugged. It was a recycled answer. It was like un-crumpling a rejected page balled up on the floor and presenting it, wrinkled and pathetic, as far as crafted responses went. Rose did regard it as though it put some distance between them, or maybe it was the wall Rey threw up around herself when the subject came up. “I could see myself living as an old maid quite easily, there’s just never been...a connection.”

Rose nodded, crisply glaring over her shoulder at the bartender. 

“Here, put on my engagement ring and give him a peek if it bothers you so much.”

She wanted to cover her face with her hands. This was not going how she anticipated. 

“I’ll blind him with the size of this thing,” Rey grinned and examined it closer. 

_ “Stop.” _

“Are you marrying a Cartier?”

“No,” Rose covered her cheeks with her hands.  _ “Maybe. _ Kind of.”

And she looked at Rey with the shyness and vulnerability that people in love do when they’re at loss for words, only needing a nudge for the deluge of them to come next. And Rey felt frightened again. And didn’t push at all, suddenly not ready to hear it:

“Tell me everything about home.”

Rose beamed at her. “I love that you still call it ‘home’. You’ve lived in London since you were a teenager! Surely one has more things to miss about London than Yorkshire.”

“I’ve been happier in The Dales than I’ve ever been anywhere else in my life.”

Rose’s eyes softened with sadness.

“I supposed that’s why you write such lovely stories about those days. It’s the same now as it was in your books. Sunny. Green. The only change is now you can't pass a shop without your books in the window.”

Her face was flushing red so she just smiled and took a large sip of her drink, even though she wanted to ignore it so the bartender didn’t get any more ideas. 

She had certainly gotten something worse than a martini. 

Her friend’s eyes set upon her wickedly: “Of course your embellishments were charming. There was a curiosity surrounding Ben Solo’s wedding that someone would cite those books as a reason to object to his union with Catherine.” 

Rey did cover her face then and blushed deeply. The waiter approached their table like he was still trying to keep his distance from them.

“How are you liking your drink?”

He was as red in the face as Rey to have had interrupted their peals of laughter, clearly sent over by an inquiring bartender. 

By that time she was already tipsy. 

“I hate it, thanks,” Rey said with some glee, taking a loaded sip and staring him in the eyes. 

Rose snorted, but recovered more gracefully:

“Sorry, Cola. Bubbles in my nose.”

The waiter left them with sad news for the bartender. 

Rey hadn’t meant to laugh to encourage any speculation between herself and Ben. But the insinuation he did anything but loathe her entirely was so preposterous she couldn’t help but laugh at it. 

“I hope I’m not seen as some vixen back in Hawes: breaking up marriages all the way from London.”

With the flash of terror in Rose’s eyes Rey was reminded of the pain of a real friend. She was faced with someone too truthful for her own good. 

_ “Oh my,” _ Rose went pale, staring down at the table, “nobody thought that when it happened, Rey.”

Rey narrowed her eyes, the edges of her vision blurring from what was clearly a strong pour from that bartender. That or just panic over what Rose implied quite heavily. Either way she was fuzzy. Her words slurred:

_ “When what happened?” _

“You didn’t know? The poor thing,” Rose plucked at the tie knotted at the throat of her polka-dot dress, a drooping bow, “He lost Catherine last year.”

Her tone was if she spoke of it in passing at Church on Sunday. Just a sad piece of news, like it was nothing to Rey. 

“But Ben—”

Rey’s eyelids fluttered as if bracing herself for impact. 

Ben’s Catherine. Ben’s wife Catherine. His marriage. A happy occasion. 

His father, his mother, and now his wife.

* * *

The last time she spoke to Ben, she hadn’t wanted to call.

This time she was an adult. This time it was not someone’s responsibility to summon her for the funeral. She couldn’t wait around to be told the news. 

She had to call and pay respects and take it upon herself. 

A pen danced against the desk, bouncing on the crook of her thumb. 

“The service is Sunday.”

His voice was so terribly deep. His adulthood had brought him an air of authority that was unnerving and comforting. He sounded like his father. He didn’t sound like Ben. It was like an anchor to her, through this pain. She wondered if he stood upright and solid or slumped against the wall. There was an immediate reverb to all of his answers that she could picture him slouching like he did as a young man, leaning against the wood paneling in the foyer next to the phone. 

Where was her voice coming from, to him? Seemingly from nowhere and echoing off of nothing, as she sat in her office, her typing ceased for the time being, but was the phone cradled to his ear, did she drift up from some spot at his shoulder and slide under his jaw?

That would be where he held the sound of her. Like her head tucked under his chin. He wouldn’t want to, but it was where she was, and that’s where she closed her eyes and tilted her head against her phone to mirror. 

She knew she sounded dried out. She’d been crying so long and so hard that the light hurt her eyes. She was under a strict deadline and had been trying to work through it with the tightest and most efficient of edits: impersonal work for a book. But he had called and that work was now hopeless. 

Her voice was creaky from crying. 

“Ben,” she kept her voice low and gentle despite being dried out, even though she had allowed herself to be her most shrill and wild with him as a child, and that was the person he knew, “I’m sorry I missed your wedding.”

There was a smallness in her tone that begged to be reassured. As her fellow child for her entire time knowing him: entreating to his authority _he might have had_ now to make it better was perhaps in only hope she had left.

So much attention had been on the book and Ben’s engagement that Rey really couldn’t begin to process what had been the last time she would ever see Leia. 

His reserved coldness was a cruel reminder.

“It was a small family affair.”

Rey heard tapping on his end: drumming, nervous fingers. Should she be troubling him with this when he had so much to prepare? So much of his own grief to deal with?

No matter that it hurt deeply to hear that he clearly didn’t consider her family. In the muddle of publishing her second book, had she even received a written invitation? Or had it been lost in the early stage of conversation with Leia where she demurred any obligation but her book so they hadn’t even bothered?

She collected herself quickly:

“I’m sure it is of little consequence what girls from your past attend your wedding.”

“Girls who saw me as a monster,” he replied absently, but readily, as if to himself. 

Rey froze, dropping the pen she had poised in her hand to write down the funeral details. 

“Ben?”

_ “Rey?” _

Pure innocence was his tone. He was trying to shame her with formal distance but his readiness to combat with her only proved that he  _ knew _ her. Didn’t he?

She almost choked on the question.

“Did you not want me at your wedding?”

The memory floated back that  _ Leia  _ earnestly wanted her to be there, who had called her many times about the planning, and let Rey know every date and detail that she should have rightly remembered well enough to clear her schedule. It was Leia who had done this. She didn’t hear from Ben about his own wedding. Not a word had passed between them in years. He may not have even desired her presence. 

His breath was deep. 

“I’m not sure someone who so plainly described me as such a boorish, irredeemable creature would take any pleasure in the occasion,” he replied in a clipped tone. 

“Ben,” she actually laughed softly from shock. She assumed, from his disinterest, he had not even read these books enough to take them personally, and this reading of them was so cold and hateful.

“My mother was saddened by your absence. But it’s too late now for your attendance to make a difference to her.”

Rey was frozen at her desk and finding it all the more difficult to breath. She should have swallowed her pride and gone to the damn wedding. Faced her fears and went for Leia. Now she was gone. 

“I should have come to your wedding. I’m sorry.”

Little bursts of air seized from her lungs like hiccups. Her face hurt, like her brain was a stone submerged in boiling water, heavy and burning and surrounded by escaping pockets of air. 

It was so abrupt she could feel him lower his defenses. Quiet himself and the storm inside. The way he had gentled himself as a spoiled boy with no friends for her as a child. 

_ “Why,” _ he said, and it was the prompt of a challenge and not an inquiry. 

He was not gentle. This was merely the eye of a storm. She needed an answer to prove her worth. 

Rey coiled the cord of the phone at her desk with a tight fist. 

That storm in him was her greatest fear: of course it would be the villain they would slay with the sword in her book. But just because in her stories they defeated it together did not mean it didn’t still exist in this world. 

That weapon was a fiction. She had the real thing within herself:

“I should have faced your bride and given her my best wishes. She’d need them. You were always an awful boy, Ben. I had just hoped you’d have outgrown it by now.”

His answering breath was swift: she’d intentionally given the wrong answer but his announcement she failed his test was just as stoic as if she had offered a sincere one. Because he was prepared for her to displease him. 

“Don’t show your face here. You can wear out your celebrity in London. Stay away from my mother’s funeral as per the wishes of her remaining family.”

She grit her jaw and fired back, staring at the street below: all the buildings with new, cream-colored facades because the neighborhood had been gutted in the blitz while she and Ben played out on the moors. 

“There’s no reason for me to be there. Nothing left up there loves me, Ben. You’ve proven that.”

When they hung up neither said goodbye.

* * *

_ “I’m with Rey.” _

She pressed her brow to the cool glass of the phone booth and groaned at the sound of a passing truck. Rose was hunched close to the phone, a fistful of coins clutched in her fist, having struggled to free enough change and dial with her gloves on. Rain made every surface on the street slick, even on the inside of the booth. 

Rey herself wasn’t entirely upright either. She could feel her hair clinging limp to her cheeks and she leaned up against the windowed door of the booth. 

Like how Ben talked on the phone; a slope against a wall at a 45 degree angle. 

“Yes darling, I’m fine. We both had a little too much to drink. I’m hailing us a cab and I’ll be back to the hotel once I get Rey home safely.”

Rose’s cheeks were flushed but her tone was so quiet and serious that it was clear that  _ she _ was not the one in any trouble.

Rey pressed her burning face into the glass pane in front of her. At least that cooled her skin.

“Rey, please don’t. It’s filthy. Up we go.”

Rose gently guided her up off the wall.

_ I didn’t know. _

Of course she didn’t know: Ben couldn’t even talk to her. 

Rey closed her eyes as a bus thundered past on the street outside. Wet mascara made her top and bottom lashes cling to each other every time she closed and opened her eyes.

“I didn’t see Leia.”

Rose took the phone away from her ear and just looked at her. Rey’s chin was wobbling like gelatin and her eyes shut tightly. 

“I didn’t go to Leia’s funeral and he  _ hates _ me.”

“Rey, no one hates you.”

“Nothing was supposed to change if we didn’t say goodbye,” she hiccuped, the aroma of strong gin fluttering from her lips, “he was the one to never say it first.”

“Let’s get you home.”

“No,” Rey righted herself onto her feet, wobbling but going on anyway, “I have to catch a train.”

* * *

“Treachery and violence are spears pointed at both ends; they wound those who resort to them worse than their enemies.”

_Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some housekeeping: We are starting to get to Rey's brainfuzz. I'm only calling it brainfuzz for now. We'll get there. 
> 
> If you thought the scene at the bar was discombobulating, well, that is intentional, so I am confirming a feeling you're probably walking away with. Neither Rey and Rose are given a lot of time to get settled in and connect with each other without someone demanding their attention: I'm sure we all had a brunch where we were seeing someone after a long time and the conversation keeps having to halt and start over. Then Rey gets a bombshell that leaves her completely off balance. 
> 
> My biggest regret is that Rey isn’t going wedding dress shopping with Rose because she’s drunk on a train to the countryside: but it was either she flees immediately to see Ben or bursts out crying when she goes along with Rose’s bridal fitting. Rose deserves to have a good time she’s marrying a Cartier, maybe, for fuck’s sake.


	3. Chapter 3

_ Just for a minute _

_ The silver forked sky _

_ Lit you up like a star _

_ That I will follow _

* * *

_ “Somebody get her off me.” _

“No,” Rey replied with sunlight dappling over the freckles on her cheeks, “it’s your birthday.”

“Then don’t annoy me today,” Ben tried to extract her from his arm, where she had wrapped herself around him like a monkey around a branch. It made a certain sense she would be doing the celebrating for the both of them. Turning thirteen had made something of a sourpuss out of him. 

_ She could write about his sweater sleeve crushed against her cheek for pages and pages.  _

_ Sometimes she did, and crumpled them all up, because when she did she was with him again for an hour.  _

_ Rey only had with her what she had worn to her reading. It was sunny then. Rose had been a surprise, and now she was on her second hasty additional plan of the day. The train was rattling her aching head against the window, but she didn’t lift it and let it scramble her thoughts further. _

_ All she brought with her on the journey was a notebook and pencil she bought from a newsstand at the station so she could scribble everything that was bleeding out of her.  _

_"My_ birthday is hardly an occasion for _you_ to be excited for."

He was grumpy with her the whole day, until when the candles were lit and cast an angelic glow on their faces, she whispered over his shoulder that she had never had a birthday cake before. 

It was small. A wartime cake. A luxury made of what could be spared of rations that would have been a punishment in normal times. Maybe the size of a saucer, a few inches high in the smallest pan in the kitchen. 

She watched the fork travel from the plate into his mouth. 

Ben took one bite of his cake and declared that he didn’t like it. 

Han’s jowly face twisted in irritation. 

Leia sighed at them both. That neither could behave on Ben’s birthday.

“Well you’re not getting another one, that was all the sugar we could spare for it.”

_ “I hate it.” _

“Well then, don't waste it”

Ben slid his cake over to Rey with a huff. His parents frowned at him for the rest of the day. Shaking their heads. Not knowing what to make of him.

Only one person saw the sacrifice it was. She tasted the faintness of the sugar. It was fluffy and glorious and perhaps too much ginger and perfect. A kindness that was sweeter and more memorable than any cake. Not for a birthday. But because she was cared for.

_ Rey folded over, pressing her face into her knees in the train car. Her head was hammering from the gin and the noise of the engine. Some lights outside the dark windows flickered in the distance as they moved North across the countryside, and she just saw the flames of an array of birthday candles. _

That was how Ben Solo gave her his birthday cake.

* * *

_ Dear Rey, _

_ I hope you do not think I am overly familiar. I asked my husband to guide my hand and he contributed about as much as he could stand it, which is to say he made himself scarce after a moment or two of boredom and has now left the house for a walk. I’m sure you’ll recognize his disregard for what he considers frivolities. I’m sure it’s because to him it’s natural to call you Rey and I on the other hand feel I’m taking a great liberty. But in his time contributing to this letter he insisted that I may call you Rey, and so I will, and he can beg forgiveness if it is required (though I shall ask for it for the both of us).  _

_ You are perhaps the only celebrity to whom I have ever written. There was a letter I once drafted to Lawrence Olivier as a girl that I was much too nervous to ever send, so I went so far as to shred it before I threw it away for I was so frightened it would somehow fly out the window in one piece and end up in his possession. I am conquering that same type of nerves with only a small amount more control of them to pen this note.  _

_ I first want to thank you for your generous gifts and gracious regards for our wedding. We are sorry to have hosted the proceedings without you there: Leia regards you as family and without Ben’s father we were keenly aware of the missing pieces. But the tea set you sent in your stead was absolutely lovely, we make use of it often, and even Ben noted its elegance when I asked him to remark upon it. I told him of course you would have exquisite taste with your fashionable life in London. He agreed with me.  _

_ Ben and I are currently residing with Leia in the farmhouse. I convinced him to take us on an excursion up to the Abbey from your stories and we had a picnic in the grass last weekend. I packed the cups you gave us so you were close to us the entire occasion. They traveled very well: it truly was a wonderful gift. He’s been stubborn to preserve my enjoyment of your writing and betrays no contradictions even when I pressure him: but I am sure if we combined forces we could pester him to share his point of view of those fond memories. _

_ I shouldn’t tease him, even on paper. Ben has embraced our life here with such a noble sense of responsibility and every day for us learning how to run the estate brings light to an exciting future. He is so like his father that this place feels a little more alive with Ben as its master. Our family hopes you will visit and see if the place you wrote about is as lovely as you recall in your books. And if you could find a time to escape your busy life in London, I eagerly await meeting such an important figure in the lives of the people I love the most. I’m curious to explore my home further through your eyes. _

_ I look forward to our friendship, _

_ Catherine Solo _

Rey didn’t send a reply. 

She didn’t have time for people who made her feel small. 

When it came upon her desk in a stack of her rarely arriving, more personal mail, she knew this day would come and feared it like certain death. A polite thank you. A brisk disregard. A pat on the head for having taught him childish things about himself about as patronizing as her invitation to the wedding itself. She snorted to Poe and said something nasty, who asked for more gossip, and then Rey felt ashamed of herself and banished him from her office and opened it up.

Her head swam when she saw the length of the page written: an unfamiliar hand. Perhaps it was a real telling off. Perhaps she deserved it. 

Rey shakily gathered up her things from her office and took a walk to Bloomsbury Square. This was the kind of mail that ended the workday. 

She tried not to feel so miserable as she unfolded the letter to  _ really _ read it. If she was going to be put in her place, she might as well do it in a peaceful park and not contaminate her office. 

No woman was going to shame her in her own office. 

Rey peeled the letter out of the envelope once again and had to reread it three times to be calm enough to even discern a tone. Words were failing Rey somehow and that was scariest of all. Words she had taken from her past and wrung dry and now  _ new words _ were existing on pages without her and there was proof that this place existed without her, more than there was proof that the shop across the lane from her apartment was once a hat shop before it was bombed and replaced with something else. Were these words, the medium through which Rey was existing, a part of her vanishing now too?

_ And Ben... _

She couldn't even begin to prise open the subject of Ben, even with herself. He took his wife up to the Abbey. The Abbey was sacred. It was so important to her, he'd know it if he read her damn books. 

When Poe returned to her office to deliver some fan mail from the publisher the next day: Rey was at the typewriter with a vengeance. She barely glanced up as the page before her went from arching its spine to being completely fed through to the teeth, clattering percussively on the keys. 

“That’s what we like to see!” he exclaimed with a grin: one he offered often but Rey rarely returned. Rey writing, as he had observed so far, meant money. The less she left her office the more he enjoyed her general presence. 

The day before she had slid the letter into her bag when she was done and simply chose to ignore it for the rest of her life.

It was perfectly lovely. 

How lovely for Ben.

* * *

Rey was a mess at the station. She had taken the first train that she could, made some frantic transfers all over the country, and lost her pencil so she had to borrow another one from the conductor. There was a run in her stockings. Her clothes had dried on the first train and then were immediately soaked through outside of the station by the storm raging outside the final stop while she struggled to find a cab that would go so far as Wensleydale. Her hair had fared similarly and she actually felt a sense of relief that it went back to sopping wet as opposed to how it had dried. 

And the struggle to complete her journey offered her no satisfaction even when it was finished: because the journey was maybe her worst decision in twenty years. 

She had a long cab ride to reflect on that decision.

The downpour of rain was so severe that she couldn’t search the windows for anything she remembered. That would have soothed her a bit: that she would try to find the object the rock formation was most shaped like or what candy-color was that of the bright grass. These things were soothing when she first came and when she finally left. 

This was her first return, with nothing to soothe her, even if this time she knew where she was going.

It was early evening when she arrived, maybe earlier than it looked, because the sky was so gloomy. Not a single landmark was able to tell her when she was close. The car was moving and suddenly it wasn’t.

The door opened and whatever humble ability her clothing had to dry itself on the ride over was openly mocked by the sky. The rain was so fast and brutal she couldn’t see much more than what was right in front of her. Inspection of the property and how it had changed over time was impossible. She wouldn’t be able to look at anything until she was inside. 

Her hands shook when she pushed the front door open. It was never locked, and not locked now even with the new owner. The Solo home was still standing, but without light, and without any life to it. 

She wandered the hallway. It wasn’t the same house without the sunlight. When she knew that going to the library would not bring her to the cluttered desk Leia worked at, whispering intently into a radio and scribbling plans no one was allowed to talk about, or Han was not reading with pleasant indifference in his favorite chair. 

She didn’t know if this place was terribly different now that she wasn’t there. If she had been missing something that wasn’t even happening in her absence.

It brought her a deep slice of agony inside that she had only known this place during the war. 

There was a whir inside her directing her to the dining room. No lights were on, but the natural light from the grey outside seemed to pool in the doorway. As she walked, rivulets of rainwater dripped from her hair and clothes. She was tracking puddles all over the floor. But she ignored them.

Rey expected to find Miss Havisham at the table. The wedding that she missed having never occurred, the cake rotting with flies coating the frosting. A big cake. A cake to celebrate that the war was over. 

The layers of dust in this house made her hold her breath as she moved silently through it.

The dining room was empty. She kept walking, on to the kitchen, and realized after a moment of sinking dread the house was completely empty.

What if there was no one where at all. 

Something in her panicked. She dove for the refrigerator and yanked it open. The vegetables weren’t wilted, a sniff of a bottle of milk proved it wasn’t yet spoiled. The food was fresh enough. Feeling foolish, Rey leaned back on her heels and wandered over to the counter. There was a sloppy stack of mail. 

Would she take her investigation that far? Only as far as peering at the envelopes just to make sure that they were addressed to Ben Solo. She held her breath and cracked an eye open to the recipient:

They were, at least, addressed to Ben and not someone else. She had gotten the right house even in the deluge. 

_ Was that better? _ Did some part of her want to find this place abandoned with only stagnant _things_ to rifle through, some strange gothic horror, a mystery that could fill a book?

Someone else had been responsible for Ben’s happiness. And now they were gone, and her guilt at any pain she had caused him was spilling out from the thousand cracks repairing herself had left about her person. 

She could just sneak out now. The place wasn’t a mess. He wasn’t living in filth. Before he found out…

She jumped as the door from the outside clicked open. A storm brought in a massive man, black hair tousled by rainwater, shaking out like a dog before he saw he wasn’t alone. He peeled off his coat, a black fisherman’s slicker, and hung it on a hook by the door. 

_ That’s where Han’s coat goes... _

Then he kicked off his boots, which slammed to the floor like massive bombs when they dropped from his hands.

She knew from his breathing he had been out on a walk, even in this weather. Jealousy crawled around under her skin. The moors produced such a state of breathlessness that even people who walked them every day of their lives still labored to conquer them. There was such bliss in that feeling, adrenalized, alive, and free. After church on Sundays Han took the children on long, long walks and they’d run in those wild grasses. It was a walk that took work, that cleared silly thoughts, and that sank someone deep into their heaviest ones.

Such walks were the essential food of writers. 

Rey watched him breathe and knew her lungs had not known breath like that since she was a child. 

Then he lifted his head, and though the sound of the door opening had startled her more, she had to suppress another yelp when his eyes landed on her.

She used to cry out whenever she was found during games of hide and go seek. There was a perverse pleasure as a child in having Ben wrench a closet door open and shrieking in his unsuspecting face, as though she was the one catching him. 

What scared her most was he didn’t even look surprised to see her standing there soaking wet. 

He’d done more to dry himself off than she had. 

She was struck with fear over their last conversation. Would he shout awful things at her again? Was she as unwelcome as she thought? She hadn’t thought. Hadn’t given a moment’s pause to coming all the way up here, welcome or not.

He combed his wet hair out of his face. It badly needed a cut. 

That wasn’t her place to say. It wasn’t her place to tell him to sit down while she made dinner and then absently comb her fingers into it and tell him how to go to his barber. 

Her body twitched as if summoned back to reality: a fast jolt at how impossibly high she had flown. She didn’t even know how to cook. She squeezed her hands into fists to stop up the overflow of desire to  _ fix _ .

His body neared hers in the space of the kitchen, him seeming massive in a place where last she had seen it the countertop was up to her chest. He was always a gangly child, and worse that largeness with a tight, self-conscious control: but now he was massive and built and just overwhelming in the way he was carrying himself. They were both too big for this room, this house, and him most shockingly so. 

There was a thrill in the swiftness of the approach: the promise of unforgiving rock as one fell from a cliff. The feeling that all was over. 

He swept past her as if she wasn’t even there. The only acknowledgement was a grumble of rage so deep she felt it through the floorboards. He moved straight through the room and only her ingrained memory knew from sound he took himself to the dining room. 

Rey remembered herself and peeled off her own useless coat. It had soaked through in Leicester Square, outside of a phone booth, and never recovered. It clung to her body like the last lingering cough of a bad cold. Her clothes were wet underneath, but it felt better to shed that outer layer just from the weight of the drenched fabric. 

Then she stood uselessly with it in her arms, Ben making himself scarce in another room without even a word to her, and after a moment of wondering what to do next she hung her coat delicately on the hook next to his.

Then she summoned her courage and went to the dining room.

He was slouched at the head of an empty table, a rattle of ice in the glass in his hand. He was still catching his breath.

“Rey,” he replied grandly, unruffled as though instead of vanishing for years she had only stepped out for a moment to smoke a cigarette, “drink with me.”

She had meant to come here and say something that mattered, to comfort a grief she knew would have split him in two, and to try and at least bridge the rift between them to some half of him.

Instead her first words were another lame excuse:

“I need to change.”

It was until she tried to speak that she noticed her teeth were chattering. He didn’t even move to sit up. His legs were sprawled open, his chair pushed out from the table as if he meant to leave it but forgot to. 

He watched her drip all over the floor. 

She was jealous of his coat: his sweater underneath was still dry. His outer layers actually worked at keeping the rain out. At a certain point on the walk to the house Rey had been wondering if, instead of keeping the rain off of her, the coat she wore was merely holding the water  _ in. _

So she felt half-drowned and Ben looked absolutely cozy.

“Been traveling long?”

_ Why was he so bloody calm about this? _

“Just since last night.”

He eyed her with an eerie amusement. Everything about her presence demanded an explanation but he wouldn’t ask her for it. He would be so indifferent until...

“Forget your luggage?”

Her hand tightened on her purse, which had been absently filled an afternoon ago to attend an appearance only blocks away from her flat, and was empty of anything useful and now sodden. Lipstick, her wallet, her keys, a compact, maybe a few stray hairpins. And the notebook she purchased for the journey.

This was a mistake.

“I probably won’t be staying long. I’ll sleep in the attic so I don’t bother you.”

His smile was sharp. He pulled from his near-empty drink.

“You’ll still manage.”

She wiped the rain from her face with the back of her hand. She didn’t want to, because it sounded sad, and she was angry, but when she tried to breathe through her nose she sniffled. 

She stepped gingerly over her own puddle collecting on the floor to go upstairs and find something dry to wear.

He didn’t let her get down the hall. 

“Come have a drink.”

She had anticipated that he would rather she leave the premises immediately. Now she didn’t know what to expect. A shiver racked up her body. This was a very bad decision. She remained in the doorway.

“I c-can’t, I’m cold, and I’m soaked.”

Another shudder ran through her, it came from the realization that she could say anything to him, and have it mean nothing.

His eyes were dark. She had prayed all the way from the station to the house that he would not be very angry when she arrived. This wasn’t quite anger. It was something else entirely. 

“It’ll warm you up.”

Ben stood up from the table and then she could see why he was slouched in his seat. He swayed for a moment, cheeks inflating with a belch that puffed out of his mouth, and swept past her efficiently down the hall to the sitting room. 

_ That’s rather undignified for you _ was what she wanted to say.

“It would be unwise,” was what she did.

He came back towards her with a blanket in his hands. Her skirt and blouse were completely slathered to her skin. She moved to take it, but he unfolded the familiar quilt and draped it over her shoulders himself. 

“There. Now. Whiskey?”

“You have a beard,” she said stupidly, looking at him up close for the first time since they were children. 

His face was every terrifying thing about coming home and finding it changed. It was like how London looked to her when she returned after the Blitz. The planes of his face were haunted like the architectural carcass of a bombed-out cathedral. Carved stone crumbling. It was all the art that was taken that she’d never see again, scrambling to picture it in her head. 

Art she tried to write about as a conjuring trick, to be seen with words as it never would be with eyes ever again.

He ran his fingers over the scruff at his chin as if to verify to her it was indeed real. He was looking at her, but not at her eyes, his own gaze drifting to encompass but not to see.

“I haven’t bothered with a razor. Don’t get many guests these days.”

There was a shimmer to the wet of his eyes she should have seen sooner: the first drink she saw him take was not his first drink of the evening.

Rey tightened the blanket around her body.

“Pardon my intrusion on your privacy,” she said quietly, while he padded over to the bar at the end of the dining room. He only had socks on his feet and definitely stepped in the water pooling all over the floor, but didn’t seem to notice. 

He was pouring another drink. It was unclear if it was for her or himself until he grabbed a second glass. There was a small icebox hidden with elegant lacquer doors underneath the bar. Leia did a lot of entertaining before the war. He dropped cubes into one glass with tongs, and left one without ice. To warm her up.

“Can’t even pretend to be happy to see me when you break into my damn house.”

He nudged a glass into her hand, but had one for himself too. Then he went back to his chair to start whatever it was he was doing all over again. 

“I shouldn’t, I’ve...overindulged,” she mumbled, swirling her glass pensively. “And thus found myself on your doorstep.”

“Intending to do what?”

“To…” Her eyes searched him. He was being very banal about this. Her appearance. Her presence. “Ben, I didn’t know. I just heard and I…”

He grunted and hefted one foot over the opposite knee, reaching up his pant leg and pulling down a black sock. The prickling of cold water seeping through must have hit his skin just then: at least sharply enough he was aware of it now. He peeled it free from his foot and tossed it aside. The same ritual continued on with his other wet sock until both were lying limp on the floor. 

They sat empty like the hide of a small animal skinned off the carcass on the rug. Rey stared at them in a state of silent horror. Something about the act was so offensive in the way he did it. A hateful flick of the wrist. Once sense returned, she had scripted in her head precisely what she felt he’d shout at her when she arrived here. No writer’s imagination had prepared her for Ben taking off his socks  _ at _ her. 

“Well,” he nodded at her, smirking into his drink. He motioned with his free hand to the mess.

“Ben.”

“Play house with me,” he leaned back in his chair with a sigh, “It’s obviously what you’re here to do. I had just figured  _ you _ would have more to occupy you in your new life in London to ever want to.”

Her hand tightened around her glass. He could have just slapped her if he’d wanted to impart the intent of that insult.

This all was so sobering. What had she anticipated by coming here? That he would fall to his knees with relief that Rey was finally here to make him feel better? Through what capacity was she able to?

“I’m not here to pick up after you.”

_ Now _ he looked contrite.

“Then why are you here?”

She didn’t have an answer. It made perfect sense after several drinks with Rose, who was unable to lift Rey’s head from the depths it had sunk with this new knowledge. She just felt like a poor friend and would like not to feel like one anymore. His agitation now was clear that this want was a selfish one. 

Rey strode over to the table and set her untouched drink down. The quilt was gathered in her free hand in a very tight fist. 

“I’m very cold. I’m going to bed.”

* * *

“I have felt lately, more and more, that my present way of living is bad in every respect.” 

Thomas Hardy, Far From The Madding Crowd


	4. Chapter 4

_ Now it's found us _

_ Like I have found you _

_ I don't want to run _

_ Just overwhelm me _

* * *

  
  


Rey felt like collapsing when she finally reached the attic. It took most of the shock out of returning to the place she lived in during the war.  _ What a homecoming. _ To come up here to her old room to hide instead of to just be happy to be back. At least she felt sleepy: not tired, not needing to lie down after a long train, but sleepy. 

How automatic the instinct that she was going to bed was: even in a room that looked like it hadn’t been touched since she left. 

The only proof she wasn’t a child again was a stack of her own books, all of them in perfect condition, sitting proudly on the table by the window. 

She smiled to herself, and to Leia, who had placed them there, and dropped the blanket from her shoulders. Her hands trembled as she unfastened the buttons of her blouse. It was flowery and prim just a day ago: crisp as spring petals. Now it looked like it had been abandoned on a sidewalk for weeks. 

Her skirt was dropped without much ceremony from the similar crinkled state of it. She wanted to be rid of those things. She dreaded to determine how soaked through the rest of her was, but indeed her slip and underwear were also still wet from rain, clinging to her skin. They had to be peeled off her flesh like seaweed.

Not leaving her many options for what to wear to bed. 

With a sigh, Rey removed those garments as well, slipping under the covers of her old bed as quickly as possible. Leaping up in that old ritual to clear as much of the floor surrounding the bed, in case some monster would sweep an arm out and grasp her ankle. 

She hadn’t ever slept naked before. Not even in her own flat. 

_ This was some night to start.  _

The airiness under the sheets made her very aware of her nakedness, no matter how tightly she held the blankets to herself to feel clothed. Her skin was cold and clammy so it welcomed the slow heat of the air around her. With Ben lurking around somewhere beneath the attic, she didn’t think sleep would come in the wake of her unease. But the weight of her embarrassment and regret was enough to sink her under the surface of consciousness as soon as she realized the soft sheets felt wonderful against her skin. 

* * *

“This will be your room.”

There was a square of light that grew as Rey climbed the steps up: so bright she had the fleeting image of herself sleeping on the roof under the bare sky. 

Leia led the way up. Her husband, a quiet Yank with deceptively respectable glasses, carried Rey’s suitcase up the stairs for her, giving her space to ascend and survey from behind. 

Things had been strange since Rey arrived and Leia insisted she could call them  _ Han _ and  _ Leia. _ There was a boy, somewhere, but Leia had explained he was shy and was probably hiding in the barn like a skittish cat.

Rey took in the room as it appeared at the top of the stairs. The ceiling had a skylight that kept it from seeming like a dreary attic. And instead of a spare bedroom, it looked like a welcome room for a little girl without being too delicate to live in. The furniture was a durable blond wood. There was a cheerful quilt on the bed. Lots of books sat on a little shelf across from the bed. 

“I’m sorry that it’s not much.”

Rey furrowed her eyebrows and bit her tongue. The implication that this wasn’t much confused her to the point that silence seemed best. She must be seeing the world the wrong way again. Like when she had seen a film reel about a frog dancing and thought for a time that all frogs could dance. When her head had to be righted on her shoulders: and blithering about fairies landed her in trouble. If it was not her seeing, perhaps it was half the world that was plagued with an invisibility and the other half could not see it. 

Because Rey lived with an absence of things that were seen by herself and no others who understood it. 

The room wasn’t a thing to apologize for. It was everything. And it was shared with her. 

Han set down her small suitcase on the dresser. He motioned to the window. 

“If it gets cramped up here, you have all the room you could want playing outside. There’s a lot of the world to explore right in our yard,” his bristled jaw carved a mighty grin for Rey, “you’ll never see grass like this in London.”

Not ever. Never before in her life had she seen so much green. 

"Maybe this weekend we can all take a drive through the Dales. It's very pretty this time of year."

She clasped her hands and nodded. 

“Thank you,” she said quietly. 

“We’re just down the stairs at the end of the hall if you’re frightened at night,” Leia added, both of them giving her space in the new room, “I know strange places can be scary.”

Rey nodded to look like she was listening when she wasn’t. Not at all. 

She went to bed and slept with peace she’d never known before. She was a restless child: agitation about lack of sleep ebbing into more sleeplessness. Grief from her guardian cold and forbidding when catching her out of bed when she just couldn’t be. And then the fear. That closing her eyes to go to bed would be the last thing she ever did before being blown to smithereens. 

_ London  _ was scary. And she was far away from that now.

She didn’t have any trouble sleeping in the beginning of her stay. At least not yet. The first few weeks were the fleeting time where it had felt like she had escaped.

Going far away to live with the Solos and tolerated like a nuisance had, for so long, been something she dreaded. It was very wicked to be grateful for her city in peril if it gave her a warm bed. But one thing Rey kept silent all through the war was that staying with them was a gift. 

  
  


* * *

Rey had trouble with the lesson in like that ignoring problems begets more problems. Before falling asleep, Rey had not properly hung up her wet clothes. They’d all been tossed in a heap together on the floor when she'd taken them off. So the problem that was a problem last night remained a problem in the light of day from pure carelessness. 

At first light, Rey crouched on the floor and gingerly lifted her pathetic looking blouse. Her teeth clenched in anticipation as she examined the fabric. 

It was still frightfully damp and cold. She'd rather swim through an icy moat than put it on. 

Her skirt was in the same state. 

Wrinkling her nose, she tossed them aside and cursed herself. She couldn’t wear them. Beyond the cold and wet, the material was transparent. 

She eyed the door at the base of the stairs fearfully. Waking Ben during this fragile, vulnerable dilemma would probably lead to him throwing her out of the house. She didn’t move or breathe until she knew she sensed complete silence. She would wait until next nightfall if it ensured he was asleep when she crept downstairs.

Ben had already assumed she came here to throw herself at him. Walking around naked was hardly a way to disprove that had ever been her intention. 

Shuddering, Rey crept back to the blanket he had given her the night before and covered herself with it. She held it tightly shut like a great billowing cape and crept down the stairs as quietly as possible. 

Han and Leia’s room was at the end of the hall. She tiptoed across the wood floor with her heart in her throat. 

To just reach Leia’s closet. 

She knew this was a horrible idea. Even with all emotion and sentimentality drained from this: it was impractical at best. Leia was shorter than her. But perhaps she could borrow a skirt and a sweater that would be forgiving enough until something could be done about her own clothes… 

A groan sounded from inside the room when she neared the open door. Deep and resonant, like a hibernating bear growling from inside the cave. 

She flew into the nearest empty room. 

Ben’s old room. 

This room was deeply forbidden when she was a child. The closest she came was standing in the doorway when Ben was very sick, watching Leia take his temperature, and he was too hoarse to tell her to scram. 

It was odd seeing it now, breaking that barrier, but obviously the adult man in the house would take the master bedroom now that Han and Leia were gone.

And would share it with his wife.

A few deep breaths were necessary before she felt like she could move again.

She crept carefully through the room so not to disturb it. 

The closet still had some clothing. She sighed in relief, grabbing for a pair of trousers. They wouldn’t fit Ben at the size he was now. They didn’t fully fit _Rey_ at the size she was now. A bit tight in the hips, and too long in the legs, but she could roll them at the cuffs later. And then she grabbed what she really needed, a thick wool sweater—

“What are you doing?”

The sweater was over her head but certainly not yet covering her exposed breasts and the dip of her waist above the trousers when the voice came from the door. Rey yelped and stumbled back, yanking the hem of the sweater down over her belly and bumping her hip hard against the dresser. 

_ “I um—” _

The breathless answer never came. The flesh of her hip throbbed from the impact with the side of the wood. Her head was dizzy from pain. She instinctively freed her hair from the neck of the sweater, untucking it from beneath the wool, and letting it fall over one shoulder. 

And then just stood there. 

Ben watched her with his arms crossed, leaning against the frame of the door. Gone was the jaunty -even drunkenly so- gleam in his eye from the night before. 

He looked miserable with her. 

“I don’t have any other clothes. Mine are still wet. And I doubt they'd fit you now,” the joke was weak and the stormy silence that followed was deserved. 

“That doesn’t it make them yours,” he stared at her, a deep meaning spilling across his words, “just because they're not claimed anymore.”

Her heart stopped.

He really thought she was here to take someone’s place. She rested her hands on the dresser behind her. Hoping it made her look less defensive. 

"If it wasn't important, I wouldn't have taken them," she insisted softly, but when he moved her tongue went still. 

His eyes were on his sweater, which was covering her bare breasts. Rey was never curvaceous, but the tightness of the seams at her hips denoted a key difference between her body and a male one, a softness that maybe got lost in the folds of a skirt but not in trousers cut for a man. 

He kept looking at her, summoning this air around himself that orchestrated the beginnings of a point in the making. It surged with this composure that the little boy she knew didn't yet have: it was loose and charismatic, quite like his personable father and imposing mother. 

She waited for him to make it.

Ben pointed down at his feet without a word. He wasn’t wearing shoes. On one foot he wore a red sock and on the other a blue sock. One was an argyle while the other was solid. She wasn’t sure why  _ this _ bothered her more than the colors not matching. 

It itched at her worse than a wool sweater over her bare skin.

“Something wrong?” his tone was so innocent again. That game he mentioned the night before. Playing house.

She wondered how many women burst in during his grief with the same meaningless maternal instruction, likening him to a child:  _ oh, for heaven’s sake Ben, your socks don’t even match. _

And if he often played dumb with the hordes of them who came. Soft hearts. Heaving bosoms. Clearly hungry for blood. 

He sounded weathered enough to those attempts. Experienced in dealing with them, making a mess of his socks. He clearly thought she was after something  _ different. _ This was becoming more shameful by the minute: distracting her completely from the fact that  _ Ben _ had just seen her  _ breasts. _

He could still pretend it was a bigger display than it was, since he was clearly so unaffected by him. Maybe  _ this _ wasn’t new to him either.

He’d been married, of course it  _ wasn’t new— _

He cleared his throat and then bent forward at the waist, fisting the fabric of his trousers at each knee, and lifted to raise the cuffs off his ankles to display more of the socks. Argyle and solid. Argyle and solid. And somewhere sat two abandoned, unmatched socks.  _ She wasn’t a fussy person but this was beyond anything. _ Rey put a hand up over her pursed lips. Ben using socks to taunt her was a much more refined approach to his moody aggression than she remembered. 

She needed a stronger stomach for this mess if she had gotten herself into it. She lifted her chin at him and tried to temper the breath that was going to leave her head with nostrils flaring. 

“Did you ever find the sword?”

It was the oddest thing she could have said, but he didn’t even flinch.

He shook his head.

“That game grew very dull.”

She tried to smile, like when she was reading aloud from her books and a memory accounted as if she was really there fractured her soundly, and she just had to keep on.

“Perhaps we can look.”

Ben’s nose flared in familiar irritation. It was that combination of terrible and dear. To get to see it again. To be the cause of that strife.

He turned from her. 

“You seemed to be fine going off for it alone in your books.”

And the worst part was he surrendered his room. He just left her there. He didn’t fight her like he did when they could never dare to hate each other.

* * *

“How do you wear your hair at home?”

It took a moment, and a second time asking, for Rey to recognize the question. Leia was delicately untangling the knots in her hair with a soft brush. The slow process of doing so had nearly pulled her into sleep. The morning stretched so cautiously, a day gently forming into something solid like bread rising in the oven, the lack of rush on the farm made her feel like she was stuck in time.

“Up,” she answered politely

Leia laughed softly. 

“Braids? Pigtails?”

Rey just shrugged. That was the only answer she had. Hands took her hair in a fist and with a knot of an elastic it was up until she took it down to wash. She was barely able to sit still through that rough treatment: but this was different. Leia had been sitting behind her for more than twenty minutes just working out the snarls. She could sit through this forever.

“They’d just tie it up.”

Leia certainly must have thought Rey was merely being unhelpful, but was kind enough to keep brushing until her hair was like silk.

“Well, we can try everything, and see what you like.”

Rey cracked an eye open at the glee in the woman’s voice. Her hair was always a chore. This tone of excitement was strange. Didn’t they have to get it out of the way? Weren’t the mornings on the farm frightfully busy, and this was just another burden?

“I’ve never had a little girl,” Leia admitted in a whisper, “and I always wanted to style my daughter’s hair like my mother did mine. Do you mind?”

She felt this sifting, winding, weaving at the top of her head. Patient hands.

Rey’s legs were crossed in front of her. She wanted to nod but realized she was jostling Leia’s work.

“I don’t mind.”

“Can I make you a crown?”

Rey didn’t even know what to imagine would be the result. A crown. But she very much wanted one.

“Yes.”

“If you’re bored, you can find something to read.”

Rey glances warily at the bookshelf stocked across from the foot of the bed.

“I’m not very good at it.”

It took a very long time: so she didn’t like to read for fun. It was torture enough at school. 

“Well, you just need practice.”

When Rey didn’t say anything she felt Leia take that response and gently observe it in silence. This took a little time. She tried not to squirm as she waited.

“There is a book there that I read to my son when he was about your age, about a little girl who goes away to live in a strange home in the country, and finds an enchanted garden on the property. It’s got lovely illustrations, those were Ben’s favorite parts.”

“Is there a witch enchanting the garden?”

“No witches,” Leia lifts her hands from Rey’s hair, “unfortunately.”

“Can I look at the pictures?”

“If you’d like.”

Rey slipped off the bed and looked over her shoulder at Leia. Leia pointed to a gilt and green book at the center of the shelf.

Once she settled back in front of Leia she thumbed to the first picture that appeared on the pages.

“There’s an elephant in the garden.”

“No,” Leia guided her back to a spot where she could begin to work with her hair, “Mary is from India, but she loses her family to cholera, so she goes to live with her Uncle in England.”

Rey mutely flipped the pages, wanting to discover for herself what happened:

_ “‘She had not wanted a little girl at all,’” _ Rey read slowly. The words felt strange to say out loud. That click where making sense came. A key fitting a lock: but what was behind the door could be something terrible.

Rey knew all about women who didn’t. Little girls were tiresome burdens. 

But Leia wanted one.

“What’s that?”

“It’s on the first page,” Rey swallowed. One sentence managed to stick out: but the whole page looked like it would take her an hour. “I think I’ll read it to myself.”

Leia was kind enough to not be smug about the change of heart.

“You go ahead. I’ve got my work cut out for me with this hair.”

* * *

Rey went back to the attic to sort out this mess she had gotten herself into.

She’d spent most of the money in her purse on the train voyage here. There wasn’t an easy fix to just get on a train back. She could wire her bank from the village for the money, but that took a more defined plan in case she couldn’t get a train quickly and Ben locked her out of the house the moment she was gone, as was most likely in this situation. 

Barefoot in his old trousers and sweater, she sat cross-legged on the floor and cracked open her sodden train station notebook. 

Luckily she had written in it in pencil so the ink hadn’t run when it had gotten wet. 

Unluckily she had a record of all her wild thoughts that she’d like to forget from this shameful situation. She’d like to go home and pretend this was all a bad dream. 

After ticking off a few people to phone from the village, her editor first and foremost, she crawled to where she had hung up yesterday’s - _ now two days ago’s _ \- clothes to feel how they had been drying. They were clammy, and didn’t smell very good, but were at least crisping into a papery texture instead of that of a used handkerchief. In a little while they would be slightly less embarrassing to wear, and that would only be for her grand escape anyway.

This time tomorrow it would be like she never even came. 

She set the rubber of her pencil against her lips. Maybe she daren’t. But the itch was overtaking her, and some plum word just begged to be remembered.

It was only meant to be a note or two. 

She was not sure how much time had passed: it was only measured by pages. And after thirteen the world could be in atomic catastrophe and Rey would be none the wiser. The cramping in her hand indicated it had been a long while. She missed her typewriter. She knew the words would fill in when she typed them and became less brutal and sparse. 

Still, her pencil flew over the warped pages, even if after drying it scratched in more of a struggle to put words down.

She tucked her hair behind her ears and rested back in the patch of sunbeam coming in from the skylight. At least the rain had stopped. Once her clothes were dry she could go for a walk before she left...if she had worn different shoes up here. She wasn’t sure the modest heels she wore exploring London would last a walk up the first hill. 

At least she was comfortable now. She might not even give the sweater back. It felt fair. Ben was  _ always _ allowed in this room. They’d played on the floor under the skylight most days in this very spot. She could faintly conjure children’s voices and was warmed for a moment at how right it felt for there to be a family in this house. Unlike how it was now. 

_ There was going to be a family. Ben’s family.  _

She banished that thought as fast as it came. Even without, it’s not like there was a place for her anymore. That had ended the minute she had been admitted to Miss Holdo’s school for girls. There where she had all the wrong clothes and said all the wrong things. And no family. She would quickly learn she had no family. 

There she was a nobody. She kept her nose in her books and wrote every second that was not occupied by the school’s strict schedule. And then a friend of Amilyn’s, herself a friend of Leia’s, had heard of Rey’s fantastical stories and made her an offer for a children’s book upon graduation. Then Rey had an editor and a publisher and a great many readers who thought she was somebody, and she hadn’t been caught dead in the wrong clothes since her publisher discouraged her from dressing like a schoolmarm. 

Although today she was certainly in the wrong clothes. She balled the sleeve of her stolen sweater up in her hand and sniffed. She was certain she smelled the faint scent of grass. It was like running through those hills again. Breathless and bright-eyed. 

Maybe if she closed her eyes and fell asleep in this same spot, she would wake to Leia calling upstairs to tell her that lunch was ready. 

Her stomach growled. She was dreaming of lunch as fondly as she was of those that she loved who were taken by death. She hoped this spoke more for her hunger than her ability to honor the dead. 

She rolled onto her side and groaned. 

She hadn’t attended a single funeral for any of them. So perhaps that was true. 

* * *

"There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they'll take you." 

Beatrix Potter

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Me: They've got such a long way to go  
> Also Me: Ben's seen titty it's over for him


	5. Chapter 5

_What if this storm ends?_

_And leaves us nothing_

_Except a memory_

_A distant echo_

* * *

Rey brought everything that had come with her to Yorkshire into the village. Not that there was much. But just in case the doors were bolted shut behind her when she returned; she made sure not to leave anything behind at the house. 

She held her breath as she crept down from the attic like a fugitive. Ben of course would catch her and make this all the more embarrassing. But the house remained still as the dead by the time she made it to the door. 

She thanked God she didn’t have to see him again. It was her only stroke of luck this trip. When the kitchen door closed behind her and she was on her way down the lane: she finally felt she could breathe again. 

It’d be like this never happened. 

Her clothes were the only proof anything was amiss. They were finally dry and that was their only positive quality left after this ordeal. At least her coat covered the worst of it.

There wasn’t enough money for a train ticket, and there was enough for a sandwich and a few phone calls, and her shoes would last a walk to the village on the path even if she couldn’t traipse the moors one last time.

She’d have to tell Poe those pages weren’t getting in on time. There was no way. Nothing she had written had been about the next book in the series, which was one a second draft. She liked Poe because he never tried to flatter her: so at least the books were getting properly edited while he avoided ways to give her praise. There weren’t lapses being allowed to spare her ego now that the publisher had made some money off of her.

She was sure he’d ruin the next few rounds of revision because of her little vacation. Shouting matches weren’t unusual in her office. Even if she didn’t mind the criticism to make the book better, when he tried to make _Rey in the Dales_ better, the story as it was, she nearly throttled him. 

Town was actually a more comforting sight than the empty house. She could wander this space without thinking about absences: Han’s empty study was so personal, but a sweet shop was less so because the memories were of sugar. The act of going was so coveted she only felt a welling up of fondness. During the war it was only open a few days a month and heavily limited in options. 

Now the windows were bursting from inside with so much color. The shop looked like a fairyland. It was hard to simply walk past without going inside even as an adult. 

When she passed the dress shop she could feel adjustments being made in her head to the list in her notebook: if she was able to wire enough money, and had time until she could catch her train, maybe she could purchase something else to wear on the ride home that wasn’t so...destroyed. 

She could worry about that after she used a phone. There weren’t any phone booths in the village when she was a child, and they felt so public anyway with all the windows inside, standing on the street to perform business. But the hotel always had phones. Sometimes when Han needed to confer with Leia he’d telephone from the hotel while Ben and Rey would run in circles around the street.

Rey bit her tongue when the hotel, along with some jars of local honey and a map of the county, also displayed her books prominently in the window. She blinked away from the covers, not realizing how much she had exposed to so many people who might actually recognize so many unchanged details.

Of course the door had a bell overhead. It was a hotel, but this Hawes was chatty, so she didn’t need to signal to anyone that a person had arrived. She bowed her head and reminded herself to keep a low profile so she wouldn’t cause much of a stir...

“You’re Rey.”

_Damn._

Being recognized was always awkward enough, but being recognized in these clothes was something she’d probably have to apologize to her publisher for. She raised her eyebrows as if it was the oddest thing in the world to be noticed for existing in any unremarkable way. 

A fetching blonde stood at the counter with a broad, friendly smile on her face. Rey remembered her from church, she had a sister, but Rey couldn’t remember the name.

“Kaydel,” the girl at the counter gestured to her chest, “sorry. I’m sure you don’t remember me. It’s just strange that even though your face is perhaps the most famous in the Dales, I’d never expect to see you here.”

“You were an altar server,” Rey smiled confidently, like she had only needed to be given the chance to speak to remember Kaydel and her family, though this was the only detail she could cling to. “We’d see each other at church.”

While Rey was not amiable she was certainly disarming. 

Kaydel laughed as if it was now _her_ that was forgetful. “Of course. A writer would remember all the details. What brings you back to Hawes?”

“Oh just...an invitation from a reader’s society, you know…” Rey tilted her head back and looked around the hotel. “I was hoping to make a call to London?”

Kaydel gestured to a wing of the lobby just off the grand staircase. This place would likely never see an elevator installed. “Yes, we have a booth for long distance calls.”

Rey’s shoulders were practically to her ears as she tucked herself into the booth with her back facing the lobby. She didn’t know how else to shield herself from anyone else who would recognize her. Even if it had been years, she knew how news traveled here. She had hoped before if she ever returned here she should do it on a publisher’s short leash: just so she wouldn’t have to deal with any old grudges or people who assumed an insufferable featured character was based on them. 

Because she had not changed a lot of details so it most certainly was. 

She looked at the list in her notebook. 

Poe first. That would get this all sorted to the publisher and they would know those pages weren’t coming until she had gotten home, run a bath, and hopefully gotten over the embarrassment. Or at least had a stiff drink to forget it. 

She dug through her purse and set down the amount of coins for the first call. She didn’t want to make it, but it was best to get an unpleasant argument with Poe over with quickly. She was already training her tongue to keep from making excuses: the book was on schedule and she did not owe him anything. The book was on schedule so she did not need to get defensive. The book would come out just as planned and she didn’t need to breathe a word about why she had vanished into thin air and wound up in Yorkshire. 

Ironically her bank would probably require less answers from her.

She lifted the phone off the receiver but couldn’t drop a single coin from her fingers before his presence interrupted her.

It was felt instead of seen. But it stole her air and she whipped her head to look over her shoulder, out of the wooden booth, as if she heard the tick of a cocked gun at her back. 

She saw him through the window in the distance and it almost made her bolt out the door. The half-jog of his long legs down the hill. He looked like he’d run straight from the house, suspenders not even righted back over his shoulders but slung around his waist. He combed that mane out of his face again with his fingers and caught her eye through the glass once he hit the sidewalk.

Rey expected him to run in the other direction, swearing to himself at how nothing was sacred anymore if he could just bump into her in town, but he clearly moved towards her and where she was standing. 

She turned her back on him like they hadn’t seen each other. Not that there were many places in town to hide, but Rey was annoyed with herself being found so quickly.

She hung up the phone with a whispered curse when the bell above the door rang. 

Rey lifted her shoulders as if to hide behind them when Kaydel greeted him immediately:

“What’s gotten into you Ben Solo, for heaven’s sake, your socks don’t even match.”

She couldn’t imagine what he’d track her down for. He strode right up to the modest, doorless closet that housed her and the phone. He didn’t seem to think anything of it by placing his hands on the frame and caging her inside the booth. 

Ben never wasted time:

“It’s going to storm tonight. Worse than yesterday. The radio predicted a thunderstorm.”

_Shit._

His mouth quirked up to one side. 

Her lashes fluttered in confusion until she realized she had said it out loud. She hadn’t cursed in front of him before. Because they knew each other as children. 

She came all the way out here for someone who only knew her when they were children. This mindless decision was more humiliating the further away she was from making it. 

“What _is_ your plan to get out of here?” his voice was too reasonable. Her head was spinning. It was like asking for her hand when all she had left was a finger bone. Knowing the insufficiency of her answer, she just tightened her hold on it. Ben kept waiting for it. “Other than leaving without saying goodbye.”

Of course that childhood knowledge would be informed by one key detail: and one that was horrifically still true. She knew exactly what he’d tracked her down for. But she didn’t know _why_ he was doing this. 

Warning her. Ben had no obligation to her. Yet he was breathless, like he’d really raced here.

 _“Train schedule…?”_ she said vaguely, hopelessly, and he took a deep breath and shook his head.

“Unless you can get a train out of here in the next hour, you’re stuck here waiting it out.”

His tone was cryptic but without pleasure in it: which was about as much as she could wish for from him. He knew the chaos that was in its way. He was probably here to manage it coming and then get as far away as possible when it hit.

Rey swallowed and dug through her purse. Forget Poe. She couldn’t get money wired that quickly _and_ get herself to the station in time. 

Maybe if she ducked under one of his arms and started running, she might at least outrun the storm. She was quite like a dog in this situation. Leia joked that if they left a door open during lightning, they’d never see Rey again if she got out.

Once when she was eleven she caught Ben locking all the doors in the house as dark clouds approached in the distance. 

The same boy who locked all the doors for her was in his eyes as he looked at her now. He’d be glad to have her gone. Running might not be a good idea but if there was no other option… 

Ben shook his head once, like he knew what she was thinking, and he was telling her that this was an impossible thing. She could not run from this. 

She peered past him to call out to Kaydel.

“Do you have any rooms available?”

Kaydel set down a stack of mail she’d been sorting at the front desk.

_“Ben, you’re not serious in making her stay here?”_

Rey started at the intimate tone she took with him. Ben didn’t usually let people talk to him like that. But he shook his head at Kaydel as if he didn’t care. 

“Don’t you start,” he shot a dubious look at Rey, but only a momentary one before he spoke of her like she wasn’t even there, “wouldn’t she rather stay here?”

“I would…” Rey dug through her purse again and knew, for the hundredth time, this wouldn’t help her situation and she’d just find the few useless things she brought with her, “I just need to wire my bank…”

Rey wasn’t _bad_ with money. For the first time in her life she even had a great deal of it. She was also deeply afraid of touching it, so while it slid through her hands for daily things -pastries, books, whatever clothes her publisher urged her to wear- Rey hadn’t ever given it enough thought outside of her cozy flat. 

Her new life didn’t demand she think about it very hard. She liked it that way. No struggle but also no strain.

This led her to be utterly lost on, say, an impulsive train ride across the country when she didn’t think things through, and stranded by her own bad planning.

Kaydel hopped over the desk and came towards them with a sympathetic noise. 

“Rey, Ben can take you in for the evening if you’re stuck here during the storm.”

She held up her hands to ward off any unnecessary kindness, “I’ve already overstayed my welcome.”

“Oh,” Kaydel raised her eyebrows at Ben. “Rey was at the house?”

_Of all the intimate implications there._

“She dropped in,” Ben replied stiffly. 

His tone was guarded in the way that many used to ward off the need to apologize for anything. 

Rey tried to flatten herself into the wall of the phone booth and disappear. “Am I...missing something...between…?”

Ben looked ready to throttle her when he shot her a sidelong look.

“You wouldn’t mind your old room?”

His tone wasn’t just an attempt to be helpful. There was something about Kaydel witnessing this that influenced him: this was not between Ben and Rey. 

She reeled back in response to this. Incredulous.

The hotel was starting to sound nicer. It’s not like she wasn’t good for the money or publicly well known to be _quite_ good for the money. Even without it on her person. The appeal grew more every second. A room to herself. No fear of bumping into Ben. 

Probably hiding under the bed all night while thunder shook her bones like tree limbs in the wind. 

Despite that, something in his eyes informed her to not say another word of protest. It was a simple request. _Say yes._

So she nodded. And thus made him the keeper of her fear. 

He took her arm. His fingers wrapped so easily around her above her elbow. 

“Let’s hurry so we beat the rain.”

Again, little to no room for argument. She cursed and shoved the change she had set aside for all of her calls, none of them successfully made, back into her purse.

“Thanks for the help,” she called over her shoulder to Kaydel as Ben rushed her out of the hotel lobby, not knowing if she was alleviating the tension of a lover’s quarrel or adding to it.

“It was nice to see you, Rey! I’d love it if you stopped in again before you end your visit!”

There was no time to make any promises. Rey had to jog to keep up with Ben’s furious pace. He steered her up the street to the lane that led to the house. She’d taken this route the last time with much shorter legs. It felt like she was walking the wrong way when his long legs pulled her to clear it so much more quickly.

“I’m sorry if I embarrassed you in front of someone important…”

Ben let out a deep breath and he led her down the street. His eyes closed and she could tell this was a newly learned approach to the wrath she knew so well. Shuttering it behind his eyes and smoking it out of his lungs with heavy breaths.

She wondered how it was working for him.

His voice was tight when he replied:

“Kaydel is my _sister-in-law.”_

Kaydel’s sister. Catherine. 

Rey almost went limp with mortification that she almost forced both the sister of the deceased and the widower to remind her of their pain she had decided to forget. 

Ben saved her from the height of rudeness. And a thunderstorm. 

A lot of unexpected chivalry for a black knight. 

There wasn’t much time to think about her manners. All that ended with a glance up at the sky, which had been sunny when she left the house. Quite unexpectedly, the clouds were already swirling into a leviathan mass that looked as solid as the hills in the moors. She could climb that sky on foot. Gray and terrible. 

Airships. Heinkel He 111s issued by the Luftwaffe. They could turn stone to dust. 

When one saw them one was supposed to get under their desks until the all clear. 

When was it all clear? 

_You will never see them in Hawes,_ Leia had promised her, holding her so tightly that if Rey closed her eyes, she could pretend Leia was her mother, _they can’t hurt you here._

Ben surged ahead with her dangling from his hand. Her shoes weren’t made for this: but that wasn’t worth explaining to Ben Solo. She struggled to keep up in silence. When her feet slid in the mud he turned on her like he had half a mind to carry her the rest of the way. 

She gulped and delicately picked her steps to keep up with him. Quickly, but delicately. 

“Why do you even care how I get back to the city?” she asked defensively, “even in lightning.”

His hand tightened on her arm. The hair on his head twisted in the wind like the grasses around their legs. Her own hair was struggling desperately to free itself from the severe knot she had tied in back in to face the business of getting home. 

_“Don’t.”_

“Don’t _what?”_

He just looked at her and said nothing.

They made it up the hill in record time. Ben’s pace ensured they were through the door of the house before the storm hit. Which, first and foremost and ignoring a few blisters, was exactly what Rey would have asked for. 

He closed the door behind her and didn’t pull back to give her a frosty distance like before. He sized her up in a way that seemed to imply he forgot he would rather not even look at her. 

“So you aren’t here to play housewife. Then what are you here for?”

There was a mercenary intention behind him intercepting her. Of course he didn’t do this out of pure kindness. She wasn’t escaping without this being answered. 

She squared her chin to look up at him.

“Perhaps to set things right.” 

He snorted in her face, as if to make her regret coming any closer.His eyes flashed at her.

“You just knew your pride couldn’t be wounded by me now that I’m so pathetic?”

She was stoking embers he had let settle to a dim glow. Time had deprived the anger of air and smothered it. She had to expect things to burst into flames with her poking around at it. Breathing it back to life.

“I realized there was no place for it now.”

Their closeness was never so apparent, nor was his pointed intention to be so, as it was when he answered:

“Not when you’re looking to comfort me, are you?”

Intimacy and warmth played like a parody in his eyes. The cheapest form. Mocking _her._

Rey shut her eyes. That brought her a step back, right against the wall, cushioned by his massive coat hanging on the hook. Everything smelled like him and it was frightening and overwhelming. 

_“Ben.”_

He grit his jaw. 

“Tell me, now that your pride is out of the way, from how deep inside you should I take my comfort?”

This was just filth, something cheaper than she ever was and even cheaper than the anger between them. It felt odd. Wrong. For the first time, his rage felt misplaced. She could understand their hatred of each other from the pain she recognized. 

But this moment wasn’t particularly about Rey. Something else was bothering him.

She blinked at him.

“Excuse me?”

“I don’t know where the misapprehension that a mournful soul was a particularly passionate one came from. I’d like to banish it back to hell. But it has no place in my house.”

Rey almost choked on a protesting cry as it flung out of her so quickly. No. He had it completely wrong.

_“How often do women come up here intending to seduce you?”_

It was his turn to look stunned. She was clearly so blindsided that this calculation was revealed to be impossible. Ben cooled at a remarkably swift degree. 

Now they both looked foolish.

“Not often,” he answered with a blush. All the heat and anger was gone. He blinked at her like he ceased to recognize her then, or had only just begun to in that moment.

She rose up to combat him: this was such a weathered accusation that she wasn’t sure his bitter opinion was not earned from a few failed attempts. This wasn’t the anger of someone innocent.

“But _they’re_ not me, so then it’s fine when someone else comes to _comfort.”_

He flinched as if slapped. His head bowed as he could only look at the floor. He did not pull away when he shouted.

_“I can’t handle being seduced right now. I don’t want it.”_

This sounded more fragile than anything that she had ever heard pass his lips. Even as a boy. Ben was trembling.

Rey stepped back immediately. It broke that string of tension that had held them so taut against each other. Ben stared at her retreat, dazed, and wiped a hand over his mouth. 

“Oh Ben,” her chest hurt, “it’s not like that.”

She couldn’t bear to react like she saw the tears in his eyes. It was too much to handle. 

“You really came here...over us fighting.”

Rey looked up at him and nodded miserably. Ben’s face flushed with a bruise of humiliation. Clearly this was not something he wanted to tell: and never would have if he knew her intention. That he had been approached in the way he suspected her before. 

And if this was what he thought Rey was doing, she was the most pathetic of the attempts, she was already sure. Even now bothering him felt childish. He had much bigger problems than what had come between them and seeking a resolution was an insignificant one. A juvenile drawing offered up when he wasn’t even interested in fine art. 

“Why?” he asked as if completely lost.

“Because it hurts.”

His lips pursed in ponderous consideration. 

It was a raw admission. One that the pride that she might not have pushed aside, but at least slipped out from behind for this moment, might not have allowed her to make.

She was about to apologize for all of it when the first distant hum of thunder came down from the South hill of the village. Both of them went perfectly still. 

It was a warning of the occurrence more than it was actually happening yet. It was the siren that indicated she could not escape. 

There was fear and complete understanding in his eyes.

Rey felt dizzy at the realization that she hadn’t been this _known_ by anyone since she was a child.

But another rumble came quickly after, and the light from outside lashed the entire room with blinding white. 

There was no running from the storm now. She just had to wait out the length of it under certain torture.

Instead of being able to speak, now that her pride was as substantial cover to her as mist, Rey clapped her hands over her mouth and began to cry.

* * *

“My mother always says people should be able to take care of themselves, even if they're rich and important.” 

Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden


	6. Chapter 6

_ I want pinned down _

_ I want unsettled _

_ Rattle cage after cage _

_ Until my blood boils _

* * *

“Can’t sleep, can you?”

Rey nodded, her eyes slightly glazed under the lamp in the attic. It was not that she wasn’t tired. This would be a long night no matter how much she wanted to go to bed.

With her living in the attic, even when her light was on late into the night, she assumed no one would be bothered. But as long as she was awake, she often heard Han’s long gait up and down the hall. Never when her lamp was off. Just when he could see light under the door to the stairs. 

She wondered when Han would give up, or demand she turn off her light since it clearly bothered him to have it on. She could set her book down and lie in the dark if he wanted. It just passed the time. The words were turning to sludge anyway as she dragged herself along. 

Sleep wasn’t coming, so it was about killing time. 

Instead he hovered for a moment and kept his hand on the knob of the ajar door.

What was comforting about his inquiry was that it wasn’t maternal. He spoke to her, not of her like a troubled child, but like a person he was observing and curious about. He wasn’t worriedly suggesting tinctures or change in diet or exercise to restore health in a growing child. He just seemed to want to talk to her about it.

“Why do you think you can’t sleep?”

Rey set her book down and raised her eyebrows.

“I’m just...I’ve got the jitters.”

She’d heard it said by an old maternal type, though the face didn’t appear easily to remember who, and repeating it made her plight make sense. Han nodded sagely.

“My brain doesn’t slow down,” she glanced at him shyly, “it just  _ doesn’t stop.” _

It was nice to finally tell someone.

He was really listening to her. Head tilted in consideration.

“A snack probably wouldn’t hurt.”

It was the simplest thing in the world to follow him to the kitchen.

The Expat was somewhat of a wizard of midnight snacks: his only effective comfort for restless children. They’d patter down to the kitchen and go back to bed and sleep peacefully with full bellies. 

Leia staunchly disapproved of this ritual. As a proper adult aware of rations and schedules she had to. It was one of those things that defied reason, the concoctions Han would create out of the contents of the kitchen, a haphazard pile of leftovers. It was an excitable activity when he should be trying to soothe them to sleep. It was horrendous for their diet. They should just be in bed. 

Of course by the time Rey was invited into this ritual, Ben had spent his childhood completely used to it. It was very normal that when he couldn’t sleep and Han saw his light on, they’d end up downstairs rummaging through the cupboards. 

Rey being brought into it was like being transported to fairyland: where hours didn’t matter and night was full of secret meals and conversations. It made nights less lonely. Typically by the time Han was buttering a slice of bread for her, Ben would wander down the stairs rubbing sleep from his eyes and sitting next to her at the table expecting to be fed as well. 

Every once in a while Leia would find the entire upstairs of the house empty and wander down in her bathrobe: demanding they clean up and go to bed.

Then Han would slide her a full plate and she’d grumble and sit down at the table as well. 

These were the rituals that made her time in the Dales seem unreal, steeped in magic, and impossible to explain to anyone who wasn’t there. Try as she might. She wanted that magic again. 

She wanted to live in a place outside the stretch of time.

* * *

Ben moved away from her just as quickly as he neared. His retreat left her cold, and her heart pounding. 

That was fine. She hunched her shoulders forward and let the soft sobs come. Her whole body was shaking. The heels of her hands dug into her eyes to try and stop the tears. 

The storm hadn’t even hit them yet. She could barely hold herself together already.

Ben kept himself active, moving through the kitchen. His harsh words were forgotten, at least for now. He seemed to know it. A glance at his face and it was clear: a twist of guilt and anxiety that was ever-present when it thundered and she was there. 

The kindest thing he could do now was give her space. Someone so examining as him giving her privacy during this moment was a relief. She’d give anything in exchange for him to return the things about her he had noticed over time.

First he turned on a light in the kitchen. The house was still dark, and only going to grow darker, now that the storm was almost there. 

He didn’t waste time. Now that he could see, he went to the cupboard for candles. Rey knew where in the hutch lay the matches: but she didn’t dare think that she was welcome to make herself at home to rummage for them yet. 

Thunder rolled up the hills like a stampede of horses. He ignored it as he tore open his cabinets.

The flurry of activity was at least a distraction for the time being.

Rey blinked at him in confusion, sloppily wiping her face with the back of her hand.

“What are you—?”

Ben tossed a box of saltine crackers on the kitchen table.

“Any minute now there won’t be any electricity. Dinner’s going to be a quick affair.”

He went to the refrigerator and fumbled through the contents.

Rey wasn’t going to complain. Any meal was a welcome one. She hadn’t eaten since yesterday.

“Also can’t offer you a bath during this lightning, though you dearly need one.”

That was a sorer subject. 

“Thanks,” she replied grimly. 

Gingerly, she wiped the tears off of her cheeks. She was going to be shaky until the thunder passed. That was going to come and go until it was over. 

But the methodical turn he was taking around the room had a hypnotizing quality and she couldn’t put her finger on why.

Cheese was tossed casually over his shoulder after he plucked it up from the deli drawer. A package of sliced meat. He didn’t seem to care if it landed neatly: the cheese nearly knocked the crackers off the table and sent the whole selection onto the tiles. 

She figured this was as much invitation as she’d get, so she went to the table and assembled a few crackers with meat and cheese. 

Ben glanced at her like with extreme focus, as if he had not just been snarling in her face. 

He held a hand up to make her pause and flipped open the breadbox. 

She glared at him for stopping her until she saw a very promising loaf of sourdough dangling from knotted plastic in his hand. 

He certainly looked stern, but it was an improvement. When she nodded, he tossed her the loaf, and she caught it. 

“Thanks.”

This time it was more genuine. 

He watched her turn away from the crackers and gently slice herself two pieces of bread. She began to assemble a sandwich but then he started moving around again and it unnerved her to the point of complete stillness. 

“I can do you one better,” he said abruptly. 

Rey’s eyes swung up to his. She almost groaned because she just wanted to eat.  _ But. _

“You’re acting like…”

It went without saying. _Han._ He was the image of his father. 

Watching his grown son dash from cabinet to shelf was a bruise that bloomed from the inside of her. The change of the belief in  _ never again  _ to  _ never exactly the same, _ which was somehow worse. 

The only indication Ben understood her was a tightness in his jaw as he stared back at her. He let the comment go unremarked upon, but he also didn’t get angry about it.

Back to the fridge he went. The glow of the appliance yielded a shining beacon of glass and brine. Pickles.

She was game enough to smile softly. 

“I was going to say; we’re losing electricity, not our entire civilization.”

If not a smile, a firm tension at the corners of his mouth told her he at least appreciated her saying so. He set the jar down, un-lidded it, and took a whole pickle between his fingers and wolfed it down before sliding it, now open, over to her. 

As he swallowed she thought of the seals eating whole fish in one gulp at the zoo and the image of Ben so animalistic almost made her laugh. 

Laughing at him made him hers, or the permission to do so did, in the very least. She was sure of one thing and it was that she did not have his permission.

Rey set her hands on the counter. The ingredients of her sandwich waited, unassembled in front of her.

“Why are you doing this?”

“Doing what?” He mumbled between crunches. 

“Being kind.”

He shook his head, finishing his chewing as if preparing for a grand speech:

“Because,” he put his hand to his chest, “you’re my guest.”

Rey snorted at him and picked up her knife to butter the bread. Her hands were quivering a little, but that wouldn’t go away until the night was silent.

“Save it. You want to flay me alive.”

He paused and considered her answer.

“I can lock you in the cellar with water and saltines if you’d rather.”

_ “Why,”  _ she needled impatiently, sounding like the child she was when she was with him. 

Ben waited long enough to swallow the rest of his mouthful. She neatly assembled a sandwich as he did.

“Maybe I want a more favorable depiction in your next novel.”

Her slowly rising happiness waned to nothingness. The faith that carried sailors on their ships through storms evaporated in the face of an icy wave. Her spirit fell back to earth and everything was cold for a moment. 

She turned her nose up at him.

“I must say it’s a vast improvement from the previous inspiration you’ve given me.”

She picked up her food and stalked to the dining room. 

Ben grabbed the jar of pickles off the counter and followed her through the house. 

“Forgive me, but did I just hear that you feel you have as much reason as I do to be  _ angry _ in this situation?”

She sent him a withering look instead of answering.

He caught her forearm in his hand and held her still. Steady. 

That shocked her as much as a slap. That she could be grabbed, altered in her decided motion like something that existed physically on this earth. She had forgotten that. She had so rarely been touched. 

“So you do,” he kept his tone light. Unnervingly so. She might think he was enjoying this if he didn’t completely despise her. 

_ Keep composed.  _

“I’m not angry.”

One of his eyebrows raised as if she had given him everything he needed.

“You are in about every way possible, and yet not a single way can lead me to understand why you'd deserve to be angry with me.”

Permission to laugh at him was one thing. She did not need his permission for something she had a right to.

“You said  _ horrible, childish things—” _

He set the jar aside and placed his free hand on her other arm so he gripped both. She did have anger. In ways she didn’t even know if she could talk about. The discovery seemed to be his aim. Just as she wanted to survey him without influence, he was poking around in her life. He found anger. 

Now he knew it was there and wanted the cover closed back over it. Pages and pages of her he wasn't ready to read: but could skim for reference.

“Not when it’s thundering,” he bowed his head to meet her eyes. Rey froze and just looked back at him. There was something centering about it. Just looking. Keeping his voice gentle and firm, “Under the circumstances we’ll only make it worse. Can we not argue about this when it’s thundering and you’re frightened? I feel like I’m kicking a dog.”

It made perfect sense. It was so reasonable it angered her even more.

“Don’t call me a dog.”

“That’s not what I mean,” he sighed and stepped away from her. With a loose gesture, he motioned back towards the kitchen and combed his hair out of his face with his other hand, “That, earlier, was a mess. I’d like to forget it for my own sanity.”

Back there was the first time she felt like he had been speaking to her sincerely since she came. It stung to hear the shame in his voice and how clearly he regretted it. 

“The accusation that I came here to make love to you? I’d gladly let that die by fire.”

He steadied his gaze with a burn of irritation that then faded. His thoughts clearly slowed, stopped racing, and were able to be sorted and shared. 

With a great deal of censorship.

She had forgotten what she had preferred about the anger as he stood without any there. 

“Rose Tico called,” he said finally, “and told me that you were on the way.”

Finally, the answer that explained his distrust. 

And probably his kindness.  _ Pity.  _

Rose, who had seen her drunk and practically on the ground of a phone booth. 

Rey shut her eyes. She’d humiliated herself before she even walked through the door. He had known she was coming. No wonder he was so drunk, probably even before she arrived. No wonder he was so unfazed. 

Composure. She could regain that. Crisp. Cold. Composed. 

_ “Capital.”  _

* * *

He’d really hurt her this time. 

It was like trying to hold a flame in her arms when he was in that mood. Impossible and painful to try. 

“Leave me  _ alo- _ ne,” he growled at her, his voice cracking slightly in that way it had started to recently, and he turned bright red when she raised her eyebrows at the harsh sound. 

_ “No,” _ she insisted, her arms banding around him. She didn't care if Ben was being grumpy. Ben was hers. 

She locked them tight when he struggled, and he tried to pry her off. This ended with both of them hunched over and struggling in a push-pull of violence and love that could only be balanced in between siblings, or at least family. The need to be alone and the need to be understood locked in opposing balance.

Ben’s flaws often fueled his inability to tolerate her compassionately. If he wanted to be alone and he truly couldn’t get what he wanted, he’d all but set the house on fire in protest. He’d bite his own arm off to free his hand if she held it at the wrong time. 

This was her greatest sin: she didn’t want to be alone. Sometimes, because she had him, she even  _ couldn’t. _

So she shoved her way back to his side even when he said  _ no _ and they started fighting because they were children and they could and usually it only took seconds before Han and Leia heard and pulled them apart.

But Leia was on an urgent call. And Han was in the barn. 

Ben tossed Rey aside as he had a thousand times before. A few months ago this would have done little damage, but he was getting older and bigger. The toss that would have merely jarred her ended up knocking her off her feet. 

Rey let out a whimper when she landed back against the bookshelf.

She was so stunned she didn’t move.

The same shock was written all over his face. Ben didn’t mean it, because she could tell when he really did. It was an accident, an error, but it felt much more grave than that. While not intended, not preventable. 

The world narrowed to the room they were in. It was an intimate world she was used to but not like this. Not when they were both this angry. Contrary, sure, stubborn, understood and accepted. This was not bristles; this was fangs. He bore his to her and it was the first time she believed he would draw blood from her. Her shoulder throbbing. Ben panting and looking distraught. Their violence existed in a bubble with their few years apart: Ben was bigger and stronger but Rey was clever and half-wild so usually,  _ usually, _ by the time the Solos broke up the spats both were winded but unharmed. Holding their own in battle. 

The change in him in the lead to adolescence was clearly responsible for a burst of strength neither had contended with before. They were matched close enough in battle to keep themselves from being badly hurt, at least now that Rey had enough food to keep her strong. Leia called them  _ children _ because that’s what they were, if not both hers, at least children together. 

Twelve and fifteen was turning them into a different story. And they couldn’t go back and they couldn’t pretend. They were alone in the world together in that moment with no parents to control them. Choices meant things, changed things, had consequences beyond the fall of a hand.

She could see it in his eyes: the question of  _ could they still be children together? _

Gritting her teeth and ignoring the pain seemed to be the right approach. She could just grow up faster to catch up. It didn’t have to hurt. 

A child would dive at him and try to shove him into the bookshelf next. She didn’t have to be.

What she was trying to prove was impossible, because even tough and wild and capable of knowing the wind out of his chest with her own fists, Ben saw she was in pain and he had caused it.

He didn’t mean to hurt her that way, because he did mean what he said afterwards:

“Next time know when you’re not wanted,” he said coldly, and it hurt more than the bruise. 

Rey did not become a writer because she was good at inventing words. She became a writer because she saw the ones in the moment that were not said.

He said it because he didn’t like how much he hated himself. He said it because he was as scared as she was by how he hurt her. He said it because they belonged to each too much to reverse it anyway, and he needed to be with himself alone, but separation meant carving out half of himself.

It still was the kind of cruelty that stole her breath whenever she remembered it. She was always remembering it.

Ben left her alone, cursing under his breath, and walked out of the house without her. 

He was a scarce presence in her life for a few days. There was no trying in keeping up with him growing older because he didn’t want her with him wherever he was. It burned and never stopped blistering. 

He didn’t apologize for hurting her. He didn’t put to words how he felt about it because for so long there wasn’t anything they couldn’t forgive. Even this, and he had to know that. 

Her forgiveness was offered by a mere smile when he was ready to meet her eyes again. 

But he did not ask Rey for forgiveness because, as she could see in the guilt and conflict radiating off of him whenever he couldn’t look at her at the dinner table, he didn’t think he deserved to ask for it. 

Rey forgave him. 

She didn’t exactly forget it either. And forgiveness did not mean that it failed to change anything.

* * *

A surge of thunder shook the house. She swallowed a yelp and set her plate down on the table with shaking hands. 

“Are you going to be alright?”

“I’ve been fine this long without you,” she snapped, sharper than she wanted to be during a moment of peace between them. Oddly Ben didn’t take the bait. 

“Let’s sit you down,” he took up her elbow again, “no, not at the table.”

He guided her across the hall to the library. An ornate carpet covered the floor. They sat across from each other with their backs against a sofa and chair.

It was as if Leia was there to tell them not to eat on the furniture, and they didn’t have to communicate how they were going to get around that rule.

Ben picked up his food.

She rested her head back on the seat of the sofa behind her.

“Do you need to hold on to something?”

She lifted her eyebrows at him.

He shrugged. 

She reached behind her head and blindly grasped a throw pillow from the sofa, which she brought down to her chest to squeeze. Cushions were a poor replacement for affection: but she’d made do with them well enough in the past.

Her arms tightened at the next flash of light and she closed her eyes.

“You’re quite a sight.”

“Don’t worry,” she barely lifted her head from the seat cushion, “just crack a door open and when it really shakes up you’ll be rid of me.”

“Don’t bolt,” he sighed with exasperation.

Another great crack of thunder. She pressed her hands to the floor and hunched over at her spine. Shaking. 

Ben stood up and left her only a moment. He came back with a bottle of whiskey from the bar at the dining room.

She considered the glasses in his hand.

“You got drunk last night because Rose called.”

A fracture of pain made it past the facade he was holding up for her. 

“I wanted to be prepared.”

“Did it help at all?”

He laughed, a private one, between him and himself. The both of him were clearly talking about Rey. 

“Not in the slightest.”

Rey pursed her lips and spoke as if poking the tender skin of a bruise. 

“What did she say about me?”

He was suddenly  _ very _ focused on pouring them their glasses.

“It would be a kindness not to repeat that.”

She could feel the twist of the knife behind it: and that was him. Rose might be honest but the malice was all Ben’s, and it hurt much more than Rose could.

The only thing that rivaled his deep resonance was the thunder murmuring at her outside. Oh, this time it sounded like a bomb in the distance. She flinched as if the windows would shatter.

She could feel the brushes of his anger recede as he watched her. She didn’t know what she loathed more: the wrath or the way he seemed to put it away when he looked at the state she was in.

He would sharpen the knife, then catch her looking, and hide it as if it made a difference. Or he was slowly learning he didn’t even need it. 

This storm would do her in without his help.

“Focus on my voice,” he instructed her, looking straight at her. She wondered how he could do it without flinching. 

If she could without flinching. The voice was so different. Liquid and deep and melancholic. 

Rey closed her eyes, sodden with misery, and nodded. She did manage a bite of her sandwich. 

“You have to speak to me in order for me to do that.”

There was a surprised pause followed by a soft chuckle.

“Well. You’re right about that. Ask me a question.”

She clenched her jaw, as sometimes that helped with the trembling.

“Were any lambs born yet this year?”

That would at least be soft and pleasant to hear.

“No. Too early for them.”

Rey glared at him. If this was all to distract her from her rising sense of doom he could embellish a little, maybe talk about last year’s lambs…

“A heifer is due to drop any moment,” he amended after the look in her eyes, almost pleading him for  _ something _ other than bloody thunder.

“Thank you.”

“And I might name the calf after you.”

She snorted into her whiskey, which was warming her veins as they spoke, and tightened the pillow against her chest. At least his drinks didn’t have grenadine. 

“Vengeance, I guess, that you call a cow  _ ‘Rey.’” _

“Only fair.”

She lifted her eyes to him in a flash of hurt confusion. His arms were crossed. The gracious hospitality had fallen away and uncovered something much more bruised.

“How?” she replied slowly, lifting her glass to her lips again.

The flash in his eyes was like the spine-breaking snap of a mousetrap. He’d caught her with this one. 

“Since you couldn’t even do me the respect of changing my damn name.”

Rey squirmed in her seat on the floor. It was  _ their _ story. It made perfect sense for it to be Ben. 

But it stopped making sense, as many of her childhood ideas had, when facing the dark stare looking dead at her. 

She found she couldn’t answer.

He kept those eyes leveled at her. 

“You look awfully agitated towards talking about this for someone who came here to mend a rift.”

Rey cleared her throat softly, “I didn’t know it bothered you so much.” 

He dug a pickle out of the jar beside him. 

“I don’t recall you ever asking.”

_ When? _ She wanted to ask,  _ All those Christmases and Summer Holidays I spent still at school? All those times when no one sent for me, even when I waited for them to remember that all I wanted was a place here and to come back someday? _

She closed her eyes. He wasn’t interested in her wounds. He had enough of his own.

“It was what happened,” she said instead, “I wrote about it. You can’t be more angry that it exists on paper than you are that it happened in real life. At least I accepted it as it was.”

Thunder groaned outside. She shivered but tried to keep herself firm. 

“I see,” he replied coldly, “if that’s how it was to you, then why bother coming?”

There was nothing but terror in the silence that followed. He was a skilled interrogator, Rey was at her most vulnerable so he was able to slice and prod at her between every lancing pain the lightning caused.

The storm seemed to take umbrage with being upstaged, and a quake rolled at the end of that silence in a growl. She hated when the sky sounded hungry. Those seal-slick silver bombs plunging down to take bites out of a city map. 

All she could do was shiver. 

How did Ben manage to make himself bigger than lightning, this argument more terrifying than the storm?

She wanted to press her face into her knees until the storm was over. She brought them to her chest and wrapped her arms around them tight. 

“I was tired of you hating me.”

He set down his drink, which seemed to be serious.

_ “Rey.” _

Of all things his tone was exasperated. But something else. Oh, it was purring and knowing and so intimate she wanted to cover her face. Scolding yet persuasive. Sadistically so. 

He  _ knew _ her better. He didn’t need a single other word to add to tell her that.

She’d been here a day and he was already done with her. 

His tone was practically growling as he continued:

“You want to just say I hate you and not have to do anything else about it. That would be easy for you. Then you could just give up and go back to London.”

Which was exactly what he had caught her trying to do.

He moved closer to her from his spot on the floor. She sat up straighter. Was he going to touch her? 

Was there anything left of her to touch?

Lightning hit the hills outside when he moved, but she was so focused on watching him that it was a shudder and nothing more when it happened.

“That’s not fair,” she protested, but Ben ignored her. Always forged of stone and fire. 

“Then you wouldn’t have to earn any forgiveness. That’s a lot of hard work I’m not sure you’re ready for. Because I’m _angry_ with you.”

He leaned close and she trembled when his head bent closer:

“What does that do to your pride, Skywalker?”

Then he left her in the thunder all alone. 

* * *

“Perhaps watching someone you love suffer can teach you even more than suffering yourself can.” 

Dodie Smith, I Capture The Castle


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, you can have some comfort, as a treat.

_ I want to see you _

_ As you are now _

_ Every single day _

_ That I am living _

* * *

_ What does that do to your pride, Skywalker? _

Indeed, her pride was incinerated. Gone. Just a memory.

Her ears rang with his parting words. Ben left her in a huff to untangle the nest of his anger alone. Perhaps he thought that would keep her occupied during the storm. Distracted, even. 

Or he just didn’t care. After reminding her of the scavenger she was, perhaps sparing her from what he really thought of her, he vanished upstairs so she could be alone with her thoughts. 

She did not want that during a thunderstorm. 

First she laid on her belly on the sofa. Sometimes the weight of herself pressing face down into the cushions helped. Her back was arched, exposed and vulnerable, but it helped to shield her eyes and heart to the storm.

Every noise had her fists curling up into tight balls. _If she had just left the house sooner,_ maybe she could have gotten the money for a ticket. Maybe she’d be on a train now. 

Maybe if she had any sense she wouldn’t have come here and had to deal with all this in the first place. Storms. Ben’s anger with her. Regret. 

Becoming a Skywalker. 

She groaned miserably into the pillow.

Nobody even  _ wanted _ that name anymore. No one was going to publish a book by Rey Nobody. She'd tried that. It was all the publisher's idea. Luke agreed to her using the name. She didn’t know why she suddenly had to ask Ben’s permission for a name that wasn’t even his. His mother was an Organa and he was a Solo. 

People like Ben could just decide they didn’t want these things anymore. A name. A sword. A story.

A goodbye.

Rey had to fight for what she could get, and yes, that involved _taking._ She had to fight all the time: with her lesser years and her smaller body and no family to call her own. Ben grieved his family and feared being seduced. Being _wanted._ Rey lost everything and just wanted… 

A howl of wind could easily replace itself with a bomb falling through the air. Her thoughts of their argument vanished. She was incapable of it. No matter how closely she conjured Leia’s voice, promising her she was safe, the memory could not be fixed into what it was here and now. 

The wind was the siren. She had to get down.

Staying in bed was always the struggle during these times. Sometimes she could weigh herself down in exhaustion and hopefully anchor herself to the bed with sleep. There were thoughts that came that made lying and waiting impossible. 

Because then it set in. The fear that lying there was surrendering to every bad thing that could happen. If she stayed on her feet: dying felt like it was more in control than those who died peacefully in their sleep. While there was tranquility in that, honor in that, and at least the ignorance of one’s doom lending to a seductive peace to it all. 

Rey did not have peace with death. It had taken far too many chunks out of her.

Fear knotted in her stomach. Guilt churned and tugged at the knots. There was that childish desire that always came at times like this:  _ Oh, God, please someone come for me.  _

The siren kept calling in warning. She felt like she had to do something about it. She had to be on her feet. Or at least off her stomach if she was going to have to sit around waiting for it.

_ Get under her desk because the planes were coming and they would all be reduced to dust.  _

With a great deal of anger at herself, she went to the kitchen and sat under the table with her arms around herself. Just like how she was supposed to when she heard the sirens in London before she came here. She grit her jaw and held her knees tight.

She still did it automatically as the storm shook the house. Even if it didn’t make sense. nothing made sense without Han, without Leia, with Ben a stranger upstairs. It made as much sense of doing everything you could even when things were hopeless. It was about saying she tried when it was over. Even if what she had tried failed. That got her through it the first time.

Even if this time there weren’t any planes out here she had to do it all again. 

That old hope kept her eyes from closing.

_ Maybe it was just a drill.  _

* * *

It chilled her all the way up her spine when she was called from her history class into Headmistress Holdo’s office. 

Rey just wanted her teachers to sit her down and calmly explain to all of them what had even happened to the world over the last five years. Every hour of class where they didn’t do so felt wasteful, or like she had missed the most important unit that had taught her how to adjust to being back in London. When she never got answers: her mind wandered. So much so that she flinched guiltily to see the note summoning a girl to the office yielded her name as if caught for mere daydreaming.

She had done everything in her power to stay out of trouble at school. This fate should have been avoided. 

Hushed snickering flew up and down the rows of desks when she stepped out of the room. Her heart pounded as she made the walk, precise and deliberate as all such walks are, through the halls. When she was let into the office, Miss Holdo’s smile was sobering but kind. 

“Rey, please take a seat.”

She swallowed and obeyed, and after an awkward beat of wide-eyed silence even Headmistress looked distraught.

“Oh, my dear, you’re not in any trouble!”

Rey should have known when the decorum of her presence was not as severe as she had observed from Holdo. She wasn’t, but that did not mean trouble had not found her. So she still could not let go of the breath she was holding. 

“What’s happened?”

“Well I’m afraid I have some sad news,” Miss Holdo took a deep breath, “I know you were quite close with the Solo family. They have called to inform me that Mr. Solo has died.”

This was so imperious sounding. Who were  _ they? _ Leia? Luke? A somber solicitor? If this was true, it wasn’t like Han could telephone her to say. But why didn’t they tell her themselves?

Then it hit beyond initial confusion:  _ Mr. Solo had died. _

Han, with his newspapers and glasses and lethargic charm. Han, who somehow knew that the right sauces would make a cold leftover hunk of mutton taste perfect. Han, who would say on the phone with her he’d see her at Christmas this year and it was a promise she had carried every day of the term. 

He was always so alive, like the crackle of a fire, and if she ever came back that light would be gone.

Coming to school had been her very grown-up enterprise. Staying on for the Summer of her first year to travel as a companion to Miss Holdo was a grown-up enterprise. Denying every time she just wanted to cry and beg to go home was what she did in exchange for the generosity the Solos had extended to pay her schooling. 

But in the moment Rey would have rather been a child about the whole thing, half of herself was split from her soul and ran out with Ben on the moors before she left. What was left in her body ever since was a void. She should have thrown a fit. She should have lived in the ruined Abbey until they found the sword. She should have kicked and cried and screamed that this was not what she had wanted. 

It was all a sacrifice to grow up, and now she had wasted it all and not seen Han one last time, and felt very much like a child sitting cowed in her chair regardless of all that work.

She had hoped the Solos would be coming back for her. 

Now Han was dead.

“I want to inform you first and foremost they will pay your remaining tuition, your future here is secure. But I wanted to tell you the sad news myself so it wouldn't shock you.”

Rey nodded, feeling very shocked.

“Is there...something I should do?”

“I will pass on your condolences,” Holdo said, and it was all in that different language of speaking to a child, overly kind and efficient, a tone Han had never used with her, “you may return to class now.”

Rey blinked away the shock of it all.

Holdo was crisp not from cruelty, but from necessity. So many girls here had lost someone to the war. With the dust so recently settling, some had lost relatives even in peace to their injuries and some would lose them in the near future to those injuries. Rey had no family to lose to the war, she was maybe the only one who gained the sense of one at that farm in the Dales. How could she explain that a man who was not her father was the most important man in her life?

“I’m not—” Rey blinked at Holdo. Her mind was already flung out across Hawes. Her mourning projected in the sad way she would view the village, the streets, the farm. A tight, frantic hug from Leia like when she had said goodbye. Hating Ben and holding him when the both grieved his father. “I’m not— _ going?” _

Holdo’s expression was that same sobering but kind look. There was no way to alter it. This was how things were decided. Rey was just being informed of the change like an alteration of a schedule.

There weren’t arrangements made for her to attend the funeral. 

It was foolish to be entitled to a goodbye from this family. Hadn’t she learned that yet, little fool that she was? 

Rey nodded and bit down hard on her bottom lip.

The only place she would be going was back to class, and she would remain here. Waiting. 

With less hope for what it was she was even waiting for.

* * *

_ “Oh, Christ.” _

It fell from his lips louder than thunder. So loud it echoed through the whole house, even if it was just them there to hear it. It summoned a rude awakening for Rey to find out that,  _ somehow, _ she had fallen asleep while under the kitchen table on the floor. 

She did not even know she had until she had woken up to Ben crying out from the downstairs hall. She woke to the startled sound of his voice to face the gray washed-out light outside and still wasn’t entirely sure where she was until she sat up. At least she recognized the rug.

She tucked her head to her chest and took a moment to get her bearings. She was in the Solo’s kitchen. She was under a table. 

She crawled out from under her shelter and looked guilty up at Ben through her eyelashes, and then shot straight to her feet when she saw he was reacting to more than just her odd behavior. 

Ben was propped up on his arm facing the wall. His shoulders were hunched. 

And he was shaking.

“Ben,” she said slowly and quietly, because for how long she’d been asleep she wasn’t entirely sure what time it was. “What is it?”

He answered like he wasn’t really listening to her:

“I thought you were dead.”

_ “What?” _

Her knees wobbled as she rose to her feet. Her legs were still a little bit asleep. Pin-pricked and shimmering. She felt like a hand would pass through her if he touched her. While his assumption seemed extreme when she was hidden under the table where he could barely see her, she certainly felt like death in plain sight with her shaky legs and wrinkled clothes clutching to the random curves of her body emphasized by sleeping on the floor. 

She felt like something dug up from the earth. Maybe she  _ was _ dead.

Everything had to be so normal after the war. Put together, composed, orderly. But Rey never was. Was that why was death more possible than oddness? 

Ben wasn’t looking at her, but he wasn’t looking at anything.

“You were just lying there, feet sticking out on the floor...”

He rested his head back and covered his face. 

She had really, really frightened him. 

Until that moment she had viewed Ben only in the context of how he could cause her pain. She was so fearful of his largeness in adulthood: both in body and spirit. He knew too much. He knew her too well. She was tensed up at all times like he was going to let such agony fly. 

But he didn’t react brutally when he was knocked off his balance by her. He covered his face in his hands and gave such a moan of pain her whole body went cold.

This was beyond the sight of her under a table being strange and morbid. She’d hit something. Something deep.

Rey went to him immediately and pulled him back by the shoulder. 

_ This _ she recognized. This she understood like it was hers. How they would bleed the same hurt back and forth into each other ever since they first met. He was always her mirror. When she looked at him now she saw herself in him again for the first time since they were children.

There was nothing in her that could stand to watch.

“No, no,”’she soothed. “I’m sorry. Ben, I’m so bloody stupid. I’m alright.”

He did something that shocked her. More than a punch or a shove could. She thought for sure that the moment she went to perform this action that he’d just shrug her off and become more obstinate and bitter towards her. But he surprised her and spun into her touch to face her.

Then he put his arms tight around her body as if he were collapsing. 

Other than his hands on her arms, this was the first time they’d touched since she arrived. It was like a collision. 

As Ben grew up with her, she could not deny the mystery that was his body. Her curiosity for it. An impulse that was usually completely satisfied as a girl by throwing her arms around him: a thrill before she knew exactly what that was. He was so tall that it was not a particularly romantic impulse even through the eyes of a child. She had seen Han grandly sweep Leia off her feet when the married couple had a bit of wine and were warm and giddy and that didn’t seem dashing as much as it seemed a great deal of fun. 

Ben’s size made him the candidate for her imagination. Just to be held. Nothing more. 

But it wasn’t fierce like  _ this _ when she imagined it in moments of curiosity. 

This was something very different than what she’d wanted: if she had remained on the farm for long enough to ever get the nerve to ask for it, if Ben ever  _ agreed _ to it, they’d probably be in the barn together, negotiating before Ben hoisted her up like Han did with Leia. Because that was how she could foresee getting what she wanted from the person that she knew. As they were. Frankly and honestly, but removing it from any emotion that would allow him to come to want to on his own.

He was holding her like he needed her but also like that made him hurt more. A bitterness when seeking help. An anger at the source of tenderness. 

_ “You just scared me,” _ he said quietly, like there was more to say but all he could get out was a lame excuse. 

Her arms banded around him, and it was not like she pictured for herself. Clinging when she needed to not feel alone. She was a force of her own holding him, and from the feel of it, holding _him_ steady when she was the smaller one. 

Now Rey assured him he wasn’t alone instead of fearing that fate for herself.

“I’m sorry.”

He buried his face in her shoulder. 

Her head felt dizzy as his hands moved across her back, as if he needed another way to check she was alive other than her speaking to him.

She knew what that meant. Ghosts could exist by only being a voice. Spirits could trick people into being alive through only words.

When someone read her books, she was talking to them, and even if a bomb blew this house to bits she’d still be there.

_ “Lying there so still…” _

She touched his shoulders gently. His voice was clinical and grave until it wasn’t anymore. He had no voice. 

“I’m alright.”

“I know you’re not,” it tumbled out of him abruptly, “I look at you and I know you’re not, I should hate you and I can’t.”

She bit her lip and squeezed on him a little, indulgently, and he kept her there in a tight grip. The words that had hurt her before slowly began to make sense.

_ Y ou're only angry. It's not hate. _

How astounding it was to have someone notice her. She wanted to dip back out to the cellar until the storm was over and hide. Saltines and water and all. Instead she was here. Holding him.

Then he lifted her up.

“Ben?”

This wasn’t the light lift-and-twirl that had Leia cackling in the dining room. She felt small. Smaller than she thought she would. 

“I just want to go to sleep,” he mumbled, half to himself, and she herself was tired enough to agree without much thought. She drifted up the stairs in his arms like a ghost. 

She came here imagining Ben haunting this place, Catherine haunting this place, but in the end it was Rey.

They went up to the attic together. 

Ben set her down on her old bed and hovered for a moment. Standing over where she lay. Again, with that searching stare like he didn’t trust his eyes. She caught his hand when he pulled away. She didn’t want him to be alone right now. He just looked so stricken.

With a sigh he settled in beside her. 

“Ben?”

“Yes?”

She could only bring herself to ask because of how stiff and itchy she felt. 

“May I, um, make myself comfortable?”

His laugh was dry against her shoulder.

“Be my guest.”

She sat up with a hint of uncertainty, causing him to settle deeper into the bed when she rose. He sniffed sharply and shifted on his back.

“Don’t look,” she tilted her face down as if praying devoutly while her fingers untied the knot at the throat of her blouse and made fast work of the pearly little buttons. Her hands shook as she attempted to complete the task. She’d ask for help but his hands seemed much too large to accomplish this any better than she currently was. “And  _ don’t _ think I’m trying to seduce you. You’re the one who brought me to bed.”

There was a struggle with the buttons as a flash lit the room from the skylight. The conditions outside were quieter than earlier in the evening. But the mist of the storm still hovered, and that lightning stopped her still. She had been too distracted to notice if it was still storming when she woke to his voice.

He raised an eyebrow at her.

“I’m assuming that blouse has seen its last day?”

“You don’t need to rub it in,” she grumbled with a flush rising on her cheeks. Since its near-demise from the rain, it had been dried out over the back of a chair, put back on, windswept, and then slept in on the floor. It existed as a mere  _ idea _ of a blouse, no longer of substance.

“I’m asking.”

She turned over her shoulder to look at him fully. When he was there, ready to catch her searching eyes, she nodded.

Ben sat up swiftly and with a yank, proving her casual observation to be more truthful than any educated guess, the buttons scattered and the silk rested limply and uselessly open over her slip. Rey let out a cry in protest but the fabric was as wrinkled as an old paper bag and tore just as easily.

“You can wear my sweater in the morning.”

Rey was too tired to argue. And she’d rather take the sweater. She grimaced and untucked the blouse from her skirt, letting it fall through her hands to the floor. It drifted, phantom-like, through the dark. They both watched it in awkward silence. 

Then she unbuttoned the waist fastening of her skirt, but left it on.

Then he laid back against the bed again.

“It took a day and I’m already tearing your clothes off,” he said lightly.

If she laid back, she’d be joining him in a very different way. More vulnerable. She peered at him. His eyes were shut. It was an innocuous comment for someone who approached the idea of that with so much fear. 

His large fingers flicked the nape of her neck. The gesture seemed to nag her to just lie down already. Not seductive, but tired. 

_ Go to bed. _

She was extremely jealous as a writer with how hard she worked capturing the right words all the time —to get what she wanted, to get what she needed, to say what she meant— and then Ben Solo could issue an order by merely using his fingers. 

“I’m sure no one else was brave enough for my plans of seduction,” she said dryly, “Drowning myself before walking through the door. What do these widower-succubi do when they come here for you? Do they roast you a chicken and then paint their breasts with the hot, glistening fat leftover from the pan?”

It sounded like witchcraft. Seduction _might as well_ be witchcraft. 

“Rey, when have you gotten so filthy?”

Exhaustion weighed too heavy for an examination of the question. 

“Spinster writers,” she replied with a reserved sarcasm, “dirty minds to combat loneliness.”

“So you have pictured the exact scenario.”

“I can’t roast a chicken.”

“Chicken gets boring after a while,” he said as if tired with the whole thing. Experience in his tone. He cracked his eyes open. Then he smirked at her immediate outraged look back at him. 

Clearly he said it to get a rise out of her.

Which was ridiculous. Ben had been  _ married _ before. 

But he’d broken some layer of frost that had kept her from moving. Rey carefully laid herself down at his side.

She didn't regret it. They were nested together like a litter of kittens in hay.

“But I imagine it’s...maternal in nature,” she said softly. “Taking care of you in your grief.”

They both had their eyes closed. Except when she opened her eyes to check.

He shook his head.

She shut them again at the sight of how calmly he took over her bed. If he could act like the last 24 hours hadn't happened, so could she.

“It’s  _ wifely.” _

That opened her eyes. She raised an eyebrow at him.

“Then you’re in no danger from me. I have no experience with either nature.”

Ben slowly opened his eyes and stared at her. Slowly figuring out what he was seeing when he looked made her feel less defensive, less prickly. He saw something wrong in her and time made it harder for him to decipher it. 

She would probably kiss him if he figured it out for her. Or run for the door and never come back. Depending on what it was he found.

His silence was to coax more out of her. Waiting.

“Does it help?” she said finally. She couldn’t help but be curious. Not if  _ she _ had done the whole roast-chicken routine; but if anyone had. 

Ben shook his head, actually meeting her eyes like he wanted her to know it.

“It’s like they think they can replace what I’ve lost by just taking up the same routine. Like I won’t notice it’s a different person and the world will go back to turning.”

He put it to words better than she ever could: the author's envy flared through her. But after the clinical burn of the accuracy wore off, it made her ache in a different way. 

Everyone getting up and going through the routine like nothing had changed. That was how she felt in London. Bombed-out blocks losing everything she remembered about them and covered up with something else.

“Do you...succumb...to those attempts?”

She wasn’t sure why she was asking. Perhaps a form of self-torture. It wasn’t exactly about sex. It was about the haunted feeling she still had when walking into what was an old sweet shop before the war to buy herself groceries in the present.

_ Can you ever live with it. Does it make more sense to just keep performing the routine. Does it ever stop feeling like you’re living the wrong life. _

Ben snorted. 

“Everyone has needs,” and he pursed his lips when he saw her flinch. She could tell he meant to let her squirm with that a moment longer than he actually did because he shook his head quickly afterwards as if he regretted saying it, “I just saw  _ their _ needs. Not a genuine sense of care about my own. It wasn’t about me.”

“You couldn’t just take your needs from it and similarly ignore theirs?” he gave her a look from what she said as if it were ridiculous, and she felt silly in this unfamiliar territory, but continued on, “I mean it is _ —pleasurable.” _

She hoped it was dark enough for him to not notice how red her face was turning. 

“I can only feel that they wanted something from me. They needed something for their own problems. A lover. A distraction. It’s like I only exist in other people’s relation to me,” he said finally, “and I hate it.”

No wonder he feared it when she arrived. 

"i'm sorry I scared you," she said, licking her dry lips. 

He just smiled sadly and shook his head.

Rey blinked at him. After all these years of using his Uncle’s name, his Grandfather’s sword, and his family’s story: he had best put it to words why she felt like she hardly even existed at all. Assembled from stolen parts. 

But the difference was that she had made Ben feel that way even before she came.

* * *

“There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.” 

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre


	8. Chapter 8

_Painted in flames_

_All peeling thunder_

_Be the lightning in me_

_That strikes relentless_

* * *

Ben opened one dark eye to her as the grasses swayed around their faces. 

He was less combative in the moors. Both of them together in the heather and peat. They could lie without moving for hours in complete silence. 

Rey let her smile overtake her face. He could tolerate her smile without breaking it. But sometimes, on rare occasions, he gave one back of his own.

He smiled a crooked smile at her this time. They’d probably been lying out enough for him that whatever made him cross had blown away on the wind.

She closed her eyes. 

“What if the war never ends?”

She had so many questions. They exasperated him, but to Rey he just had so many answers. Or at least, enough answers and more time than all the adults. 

“So you can stay here forever?” 

He raised an eyebrow and looked rather amused. The only person worrying about when the war was _over._

“Would that be so bad?”

They all felt like a proper family. Would they give her up when they didn’t have to keep her?

Ben sighed.

“If it keeps going longer, I’d have to enlist soon.”

Rey bit her lip and rolled onto her back. She didn’t want to go back to London. But she also did not want Ben to go to war where he might die. 

Her eyes wandered up to the blue sky. It was canopied with precarious carved stone arches: the remnants of the Abbey. Leia didn’t like them crawling around in the ruins. They were dangerous. 

Sometimes her brother would find them there on his walks: but he never told Leia about it. He’d settle himself on the stone foundation at waist-height and tell them stories about the sword. 

Despite his interest in _finding_ it, Ben never looked interested when Luke talked about the legend of the Skywalkers. 

Rey was enraptured by it.

There wasn’t enough _time._

She took Ben’s hands in hers. Her fingers were white from her grip.

“When we find the sword, you have to take it with you.”

His dark eyes settled heavy on hers. His nostrils flared with a heavy breath.

He didn’t want to leave as much as she didn’t want to be left. He knew what this all meant to her. Growing old enough to leave her was considered growing old enough to never be the same again.

He nodded grimly. 

“I’ll take it if it means protecting you.”

“No,” she replied softly, still touching his hand, “you have to take it so it keeps you safe and you can come home.”

* * *

Rey’s eyes opened to the familiar attic. It looked the same but it _seemed_ different. She felt like Alice in Wonderland, too big for a room for a normal person. 

This bed _had_ fit her the night before. 

A few lazy blinks yielded her reason: a direct assault of Ben Solo only inches away from her face. Dead asleep.

Rather...beautiful. 

Her lashes fluttered to shake off lingering feelings of sleep. She was certainly being too dreamy.

There was no room in the bed. They both slept over the covers and he was curled up like a serpent in an attempt to fit. That could not have been comfortable. 

Tentatively, she reached out and touched the shiny black hair that fell over one eye. 

He opened them. 

She wanted to snatch her hand back but she didn’t. She kept touching his hair, and the brow above his eye that was so much sterner since she’d seen him last. 

“Don’t tell me to cut it.”

She raised her eyebrows and said nothing. 

“I don’t cut it because…”

“The — _the ones who come to take care of you—_ do they usually tell you that it badly needs a cut?”

He blinked at her slowly. Nostrils flaring.

“Yes,” he admitted in a sullen tone. Without malice. Just grumpy. 

_Just grumpy._

She almost smiled at him.

“When you almost left yesterday,” he began softly, staring at the ceiling. He took a moment to wet his lips before continuing. In that time her heart was hammering in her chest. Harsh and brutal, like a dog scratching at a door to go out, “would I never have seen you again?”

Her throat was dry.

“Maybe.”

“If I rang you,” he kept his eyes up, like it hurt to look at whatever was on her face, “and told you to come up for a proper visit—”

“I guess now we’ll never know,” she interrupted, her heart going too fast, she needed to slow this down, “I’m on a proper visit now.”

Now he did look at her. 

“You’re not going to run off without saying goodbye?”

She shook her head. Feeling a little calmer: if this was what he didn’t want, she could manage within those rules. It was better than yesterday, no matter how awkward, they were back to modest civility. 

_“Proper visit_ means you have to be a good host.”

His answering laugh was relieved. 

Rey rolled over onto her belly. On her side it felt like she was going to fall against him because he was so heavy, the mattress slightly caved to draw them together at some point in the night. She felt planted, more in control, and could look at him without feeling as if she would topple into him at any moment. 

“I’m sorry about last night.”

He nodded at her, a tense swallow chording his throat.

“It’s alright.”

He looked embarrassed. Which was ironic, since this had been such a parade of shame for her since arriving here.

“I’m sorry I came here to comfort you and just ended up saying all the things I’ve been saying to you in my head over the years.”

Again, that nose tensed, the curl of the nostril, but he didn’t flinch.

“Especially when you’ve been angry with me for so long and I—”

She swallowed this time and looked away.

“And if I’m nothing to you, you have to stop taking the things I say personally.”

“You’re not nothing to me.”

Then what _was_ she?

Rey glanced up at him. It was an absurd accusation after he clung to her and willingly slept in the same bed when she bade him to stay with her, but she still wanted to hide behind it. 

“Well I guess you’re right,” she said finally, “that does make it harder.”

He nodded at her. He was not a solution-based perspective. 

“Perhaps,” she wet her lips, “now that I’m here, you could tell me the reasons why you’re angry with me? I can’t guess them all, Ben, but I can...I can try to understand.”

Ben looked at her for a moment, his expression unreadable. 

“One at a time,” he suggested mysteriously, “so not to overwhelm you with them all.”

She swallowed.

“That’s fine.”

There was a spark of amusement in his eyes. She didn’t trust it well enough to know if it was to be shared with her yet. She didn’t assume he was offering: that didn’t feel safe quite yet.

“We might keep in contact then, if I can’t get to them all while you’re here.”

Her stomach both fluttered and churned. Hope and dread. The feeling of facing hard work to fix a situation that could be fixed. 

“And in return could you,” she closed her eyes. A soft, embarrassing sound came from deep in her throat. She felt a hand cup her arm and stroke very gently, but she didn’t open her eyes, “could you possibly...help me figure out...what’s wrong with me?”

“Give me something harder,” he said, and she winced, but she opened his eyes when a similar sound cracked his sentence in half, “you’re lonely.”

She blinked at him, frozen. Ben grunted and sounded, for a moment, like Han.

He got up out of the bed. Her heart nearly burst. It was like a lethal bullet. He paced the room and carefully folded a blanket that had fallen to the floor in sleep. Then he glanced back at her: numb in the bed.

She pressed her cheek to the pillow and stretched out for the first time she was fully able since they laid down. 

She looked him up and down where he stood.

“Ben,” she finally sighed, closing her eyes again, “I like your socks.”

Her eyes were shut, but the breath that followed seemed in the spirit of a laugh. 

Her shoulders felt airy from the silky slide of her slip’s straps. Everything in the room went still as she instinctively cuddled into the patch of bed that was still warm from his body. It was not self-conscious how immediately she nestled in his warm outline. But the way he looked at her when she did was. For both of them.

They stared at each other, shaken by the moment. 

She prayed he would not tell her to leave the warmth he left behind.

“I’ll get you a sweater,” he said softly instead, after a moment’s thought and careful concentration. 

And he slowly descended the stairs, giving her a chance to let all that sink in. 

* * *

“Do you have much experience with men?”

Rey almost choked on her tea. 

Rey took tea for this meeting. Maz took a cigarette.

Maz assessed her, seated and coughing with a red face, with eyes narrowed behind her glasses. 

“You’re young. Girls who don’t know the ropes about industries like this, the _personalities,_ tend to be known for more than their literary talent. A lot of people are going to tell you what’s what. A what’s what isn’t private meetings where there is no paperwork to sign.”

Rey flushed and nodded stiffly. 

Holdo had arranged this meeting. To her knowledge, Maz had read her manuscript, but hadn’t yet said a word to her about the writing.

Maz flicked her ash absently. 

“If you’re inexperienced with men, the wining and dining takes its toll. Do you understand?”

Again, Rey nodded.

“Even if it’s the fun part,” Maz added as an afterthought, her tone growing fond in memory. 

Rey bit her lip to keep from asking all of the questions that were now plaguing her. She recrossed her legs and fidgeted in her seat.

“Did you... _like_ the book?”

Holdo didn’t give Rey much information about this meeting she’d arranged for her: Holdo was never big on unnecessary information. Maz was a friend and Maz read her manuscript and Maz would help. What she did and who she was didn’t seem to be necessary information.

It certainly wasn’t the most professional setting. The office itself was teeming with antiques on top of books and books on top of keepsakes. Usually the crispness of a desk could yield a few hints: this one was crammed like its keeper was knee-deep in locating an ancient lost civilization. 

The woman sitting across the desk from her stubbed out her cigarette. 

“Yes.”

“Oh,” Rey looked at the floor, a small smile warming her face. She tried not to swing her feet in excitement. 

“We wouldn’t be having this meeting if I didn’t.”

Rey nodded, biting her lip expectantly. Someone liked her book. All the thoughts and feelings she had slaved over for years, since that train away from the Dales, and it was finally being recognized…

But that was the last she heard of Maz liking her book. She would soon learn that it wasn’t about how warm and fuzzy her story made anyone involved in publishing _feel._

Maz looked her up and down, “Dameron should take care of you, if you know not to fall for the charm. And if you look less pretty than you do now. They’ll eat you alive. Do you have any tweed?”

Dameron almost saw through the tweed: maybe _saw_ was the incorrect word, but he could smell her age and inexperience under the matronly outfit. He took her out for dinner instead of a meeting in the afternoon and talked the entire time and also did not mention if he liked her book. But by the end of it, he turned to her and said he looked forward to their relationship. After Maz’s warning Rey almost gasped and nearly decked him in the face with her handbag: but it turns out he truly meant professionally. 

That she was quite pretty occurred to him far too late, an afterthought for a busy man, and only came after her first printing sold out and she had too much to hold over him for him to ruin the whole affair. 

She kept him off for all the years the worked together. In some ways, it made her feel quite savvy. In others, it made her feel hollow. Some nights when Poe would look her up and down, dragging from his cigarette and narrowing his eyes, like he couldn't quite puzzle her out made her feel as if it was all some great illusion. Under the tweed, under the glasses she wore for the first year not because she needed them but because she thought they'd help keep his hand off her knee. They did. She'd fooled them all. She aged without any years passing. She'd vanished into the golden years of her life without incident.

Rey was grateful that her editor had mentally skipped the stage of her between child and old woman. She was very happy to think the rest of the whole world had done the same.

But she sometimes got the feeling she had skipped something very important, and like Poe, she couldn't puzzle out why.

* * *

“May I take a moment to go outside?”

Ben was buttering toast and snorted. Rey had a much needed bath while he went to care for the animals. Every inch of her had gotten the scrubbing it needed. Her skin was singing with a fresh feeling. Now they were both in the kitchen and keeping a careful distance after being tangled in bed an hour ago. Keeping light contact with wherever they stood, flitting shyly away like moths whenever the other came too close. 

A delicious rain was sliding down the windows, steam fogging the edges of the panes. While she hated thunder, she loved a warm, rainy day on that farm. It was the greenest the landscape ever got: the sky slate gray making every color almost fluorescent. 

“Are you going to run away again?”

 _“I said I wouldn’t,”_ she crossed her arms, which she kept having to do to try to keep the sleeves of his sweater from drowning her hands, “I went to town yesterday to make a few calls. I didn’t really have a set plan for leaving you yet.”

He glanced up at her.

“But it was your intention?”

She bit her lip. Ashamed. 

“It was an aim. I wasn’t sure how to achieve it. I had hoped to leave in the most painless way possible.”

“By making me know once you were here that you’d like to be gone as soon as possible.”

There wasn’t anger in it. Frustration, maybe, but no wrath. She almost wanted to thank him for not letting her get away with her foolishness. There was a softness to the way that she was managed that had an unnerving sympathy for her foolishness: like when she cried when a scene needed to be cut from a draft or something foolish needed to be added in, like a romance—

“I didn’t want to make you feel like it was you,” she kept her hands neatly folded on the back of a kitchen chair. He brought his toast to his mouth and that first, lethargic crunch almost made her heart bleed. He still ate toast slower and louder than any other human being. 

With his sweater, she wore her skirt, which hadn’t fared excellently: but at least wasn’t torn on the floor of her childhood bedroom. She ate quickly, standing at the table, and glanced out the window again.

He caught her looking and sighed. 

“Take some air,” he finally agreed, “I want my sweater back, so you can’t run away with it on.”

She smirked and walked lightly to the kitchen door.

"The only way I can leave is naked, I understand." 

Ben's gawking expression drew attention to the gray light against his pale skin, his dark eyes, how his hair was still mussed from sleep. It was an expression that pulled her to his face: alive, awake, _alive._ The joke didn't go down smoothly: but she didn't intend for it to.

The musk of farm soil was the first to greet her, the soft mud of paddocks, the heavy warmth of hay. Her body shivered: she hadn’t been met with such delights in London. The humidity of the weather coated her lungs until she felt immersed in it. Her damp hair coiled as it didn’t as much dry but slowly met the saturation of the dampness surrounding her. 

She could see the cows wander about their pasture, chewing lazily, and occasionally a lazy sound rumbled across the earth when they _mooed_ at her. They sounded so put off by visitors that she couldn’t help the smile on her face. 

She longed to go for a walk, but the weather wouldn’t permit it, and earth wouldn’t allow her shoes even if the skies did. 

“Who were you trying to phone yesterday?”

She glanced at the open kitchen door, which Ben half-hung out of. 

A humorless chuckle fell from the grasp of her throat. 

“My editor,” she sighed, “and I needed to wire my bank because I didn’t bring any money.”

He nodded like this wasn’t a surprise.

“Rose said you were off like a shot.”

Her stomach turned. Right. There were witnesses to this insane stunt.

_“Did she.”_

“She said you’d look like you’d seen a ghost,” he took a sip of coffee, not looking away from her, “maybe you had.”

Rey dipped a hand under the throat of his sweater and rubbed at her sternum: the skin above it feeling tight. 

They sat in the cover of the roof’s overhang in silence. 

“Cow’s due to drop?” she said conversationally. There was a beautiful, fluffy white heifer with a brown nose who looked _very_ expectant. A sweet-looking thing. A good mother, Rey realized with a pang, just a snowy soft cow to love.

He chuckled to hear his words parroted back at him. 

“Yes. Baby Rey.”

She closed her eyes and exhaled through her nose.

“When do you think you’re going to tell me something you’re angry about?”

He took a slow sip of coffee. 

“Any day now.”

She glared at him, but as she looked back, his eyes narrowed to focus on a spot in the distance. She whirled around to check.

A yellow umbrella bobbed cheerfully in the distance, its carrier hidden, but was clearly coming up the dirt road to the house. 

The polite thing for Ben to do would be to at least guess who it was as they approached. He didn’t. He kept quiet. The climb up that hill was observed in silence, Rey twitching with curiosity and fear that her visit would overlap with, well, one of his more _expectant_ visitors. 

Only when the stranger came up to the end of the drive did they tilt back their umbrella: it was Kaydel, laden with a few bags and an abundant smile. 

“Oh,” Rey was somewhat relieved and scared by this. She lifted her hand, locked too close to her body to register properly as a gesture.

Ben smiled back in greeting and waved.

“I phoned Kaydel,” he said after watching her process this, “just to bring you a few things. We can sort out anything you need from the village when it lets up.”

“She didn’t have to come all this way for me,” Rey whispered in disbelief. Catherine’s sister, at the behest of her widower _helping her,_ was such a sensation of kindness it seemed to touch her through the grave. She shivered as Ben crossed the yard to take Kaydel’s bags from her and awkwardly pluck up the umbrella to cover them both: a gesture chivalrous but not grandly so for how he had to bend at the legs to walk in step with Kaydel to the door. 

“Hello Rey,” Kaydel said breathlessly, “oh, you look lovely.”

It was charitable to say to a woman with no lipstick on, but Rey did at least feel fresh-faced and yesterday she was sure she looked frightful in comparison.

“Thank you,” Rey looked at the muddy ground, “I feel...rested.”

“I honestly feel better looking at you safe and sound here. Even if I know it isn’t true, the newspaper are absolutely frantic, it gets one all riled up—”

Both Kaydel and Ben were entering the house, rain pouring off them and onto the kitchen floor. Rey followed them, but was blocked in the doorway by the mess of removing a coat and boots and lowering an umbrella.

Her host was silent: but clearly not unknowing from the way he stared at the floor with a grim line to his mouth.

Rey looked at Ben, then back at Kaydel, “Newspapers?”

“Everyone in London says you’ve vanished,” Kaydel clasped her hands together, “they’ve no clue where you’ve gone. I suppose it’s a little secret in the Dales.”

Rey blinked at them both for a moment in shock.

“I have to—I need to call my editor.”

Then she rushed breathlessly out of the room. She could feel someone at her heels: without needing to turn around she knew exactly who it was. 

“I only found out when I called Kaydel when you were in the bath,” there was a tone of amusement in his voice, “I was going to tell you.”

“The police could be looking for me,” she hissed at him, plucking the telephone up from the cradle. She tucked her wet hair behind her ears and glared at him.

 _“That’s not exactly my fault,”_ he hissed back at her, echoing her livid tone too accurately to be doing anything but teasing her. “You’re the one always vanishing without a trace.”

She glowered at him as she began to dial the number for Poe’s office. The rotary dial kept getting twisted up in her fingers, for she was distracted and flustered. It was likely she’d just get passed over by his secretary, even if she was apparently a missing person. 

She nearly yelped when Ben took the phone from her fist and gently hung it back up. Her eyes shot up to his, expecting antagonism, and she saw an expression more contemplative than anything else.

“You know, Agatha Christie once went missing for a number of days. I believe for over a week. She turned up fine.”

_He could not really find this funny._

She tried to tug the phone out of his hand. He kept it clenched firmly in his grasp. Their fingers tangled and grappled with each other in the struggle. 

He tugged the phone close to his chest, and her arm and her body, with a few off-balance steps came with it. 

“Later,” he said quietly, looking at her intently, “we can sort it all out later. _Please.”_

The moment she called Poe he’d be demanding she get back to the city. She had pages to worry about. Deadlines. Appearances. The minute she made contact again she’d only be worried about how soon she could leave and resume her life.

Neither of them were ready for that. Even if what would come before that time was scary.

Rey released the phone and stepped back. 

He cleared his throat and looked away, placing the phone back against the receiver.

They didn't speak of it again and went to the kitchen to see Kaydel.

* * *

You gave too much rein to your imagination. Imagination is a good servant, and a bad master. The simplest explanation is always the most likely.

_-Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair At Styles_


	9. Chapter 9

_ What if this storm ends? _

_ And I don't see you _

_ As you are now _

_ Ever again _

* * *

Kaydel had been kind enough to bring Rey a number of items of women’s clothing: not to be missed at all by anyone, as they had been left behind and collected from rooms at the hotel and sat lonely and abandoned in a cupboard with no one to claim them. A collection of pieces from so many strangers. None of which had met, but would seek acquaintance on Rey.

Shoes as well. Bought for her. Her size: ones she could properly walk in. A slow inhale of pleasure filled her lungs at the realization she could go for a proper walk on the moors now. It was hard not to immediately shove her feet into them and tramp up the hill through the rain and mud. It pleased her so much to have the ability to do so. Selfishly, all she wanted to do was go out alone. The weather kept her inside over politeness. 

There was also the kindness of a few pairs of clean knickers: these bought and almost intentionally left in the bag with receipt to reassure Rey of their newness. A feminine touch she desperately hoped was merely Kaydel operating out of women’s intuition that Rey brought  _ nothing _ with her and not a...request from her brother-in-law. 

Ben wasn’t completely out of the room when Rey was inspecting her neat pile of borrowed clothing: she didn’t know what she was opening at the time until it was out in the open. He did see a lace edge or two before exiting the kitchen on his own fit of bluster, red in the face, offering both women drinks at far too early in the day for it just to find a way to excuse himself from what he had seen.

She wondered how Ben worked that out for Kaydel to have them up to the house by the afternoon. What was said on the phone to her. 

Luckily his sister-in-law was too kind to reveal anything.

The extra company was welcome after how raw the last few days had been. A sunny presence peeking from between the clouds. Kaydel’s braided crown was gold and elegant, she moved with no awkwardness, and between the sister and the widower, Rey could try to parse out who the woman was that left them both behind. 

Catherine was still mysterious. But the act of searching for clues was always disruptive. She hoped her searching would not totally unsettled what little stability they had found to resume their lives. Ben especially seemed precarious: the subject mostly untouched. 

And it felt foolish to sit around asking questions when now two people were involved with finding her a change of clothing.

Rey kept on his sweater because it was cold that day, but changed into a clean pair of undergarments and a skirt from the pile that was slightly too short but didn’t seem to matter if she was barefoot to wear it. It was clean, and that was what mattered.

When she left the powder room, she could hear Ben still making cocktails in the dining room. She crept into the kitchen, gliding past him, where Kaydel was rummaging through all the cabinets.

“Thank you,” she said quietly, which seemed to matter woman-to-woman now that Kaydel was a little more caught up with her reasons to be here.

Kaydel gave her an easy smile. 

“Ben once said to me it would take a lot to get you to come back,” she hoisted a large roasting pan onto the kitchen table, “so I can assume you’ve been through a lot.”

Rey held back a groan, but the blonde shook her head.

“We  _ all _ have,” she gestured between herself and Rey, then cast a hand in the general direction Ben had vanished to, “I’m up here when I can be, Ben checks on me when he’s in the village. It’s alright. We take care of each other.”

“Thanks for the help,” Ben said gruffly, coming back with three large whiskey glasses tangled throughout his spread fingers. His hands were like tree branches. 

He didn’t seem to know that what he was thanking her for seemed to align in the greater picture of what Kaydel meant: but it warmed Rey to a degree. The casual exchange of gratitude.

“I’m making dinner,” Kaydel crossed her arms and glared at him, “have you been feeding her?”

Rey sank a few steps backwards, watching this play out with more interest than was polite. It was hard not to laugh to herself with Kaydel being so fearsome. 

“She’s been well cared for.”

Rey bit her tongue and raised her eyebrows at him.

He faltered at the incredulous look on her face, wetting his lips.

_ “I’m doing my best,” _ he added hastily, his face red.

She herself blushed in return. He certainly did not need to do his best, exert his sincerity, for someone like her. She looked away, almost ashamed.

“You’re hopeless,” Kaydel shook her head, rolling up her sleeves. “I’ll cook. Go get me a chicken.”

Rey struggled to hide her amused expression. Ben glared at her. 

“Rey, come help me,” he said, without much room to argue. She bit her lip and nodded a brief goodbye to Kaydel before following him out the door into the rain. 

Ben walked stiffly to the barn, paces in front of her, so they were not together in their walk at all.

_ “Roast chicken,” _ Rey asked without asking. 

He turned over his shoulder and gave her a very disagreeable look. 

“Don’t even think it. Every mother teaches their daughter how to roast a chicken. She’s just being kind.”

A pang sounded through her bones: loud and resonant as an afternoon church bell through cathedral eaves. It was a skill she’d told him she lacked, and for reasons that were quite clear. 

And Leia hadn’t taught her to roast a chicken. So whatever she was to Leia: it wasn’t a daughter. 

He swallowed and brushed past her.

“And the point of it,” he turned abruptly as if an afterthought, facing her and ducking closer to have a private moment even so close to the house, “is that it is  _ usually _ very nice to have someone roast a chicken for you. It makes you feel cared for.”

Rey worried her lips between her teeth.

“And she makes you feel  _ cared for?” _

His breath came in a hot rush out his nose as he neared the coop. 

He climbed the fence, not bothering with the gate, in an impressive bound reliant on the strength of his arms. She tried not to blink too many times.

“We both lost someone important. Kay’s been very kind to me since Catherine. I can’t say I was ever a good brother-in-law, but she still treats me like family. I was a mess for most of last year. She kept me fed and functional and made me drag myself to dinner at hers once a week. So  _ no. _ What you’re thinking isn’t the same thing at all. There wasn’t an ounce of selfishness to it.”

Despite feeling properly chastened, it was nice to hear. That someone in his life didn’t make him feel that way. Used. Desperately needed, when he was so in pain himself. 

She leaned over the fence as he waded into a field of bouncing little hens. 

A question overtook her: no matter how off-topic.

“How do you choose who will die.”

He closed his eyes and breathed out his nose again.

“I try not to pay attention and just grab whichever one.”

It did seem like the best plan of attack, and he snatched one white-speckled creature and carried it snugly under his arm. His posture was stiff with distaste. He stood in the mud for a moment and seemed to be, if she didn’t know any better, lost in a moment of silent prayer.

“I’m sorry.”

He stood there, staring into space.

“Don’t be.”

“I am,” her voice sharpened until he looked at her, “for making an assumption. And for seeing things as if they could only exist one way. I’m glad she’s your friend.”

He blinked at her. 

“She is my friend, and it seems like she’d like to be yours,” another chicken hopped onto his foot. He shook it off absently and it flapped uselessly away: ignorant of its own luck in avoiding death. The animal’s trust in his harmlessness seemed to pain him, considering why he had entered the pen. “It goes both ways. A nice meal does make you feel cared for. And now you should feel that way too. She’s doing this  _ for you, _ not me.”

Rey nodded, swallowing a knot in her throat.

A silence followed because she couldn’t think of anything to say.

“You know how hard it is for me to trust kindness,” he looked away again, “I trust hers because it feels like she’s the only one who knows what I lost.”

It would be wise to get out of the rain but they didn’t seem to be in any rush. Not now. Not over this.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

They both were repeating themselves but it meant different things this time.

Ben waded out of the coop Rey caught the gate for him so he wouldn’t lose hold of the hen in his arms. He didn’t look at her as he moved gingerly to a set of stone slabs outside the barn where Han would perform this same task for Sunday dinners. 

“There’s a basket in the barn on the white table, would you fetch it?”

She nodded and tried not to flinch as he took a knife from his pocket and unfolded it. She wasn’t sure how necessary the basket was to this chore but it did spare her having to watch. 

The barn was so much cleaner than it was when she was little. Unruly piles of hay used to tumble off every surface, like every square inch of the interior was one stall. Now it was surprisingly orderly. 

She found she wasn’t surprised that Ben’s first act of master of this farm would be to clean up all the mess. It lacked the softness she enjoyed in her childhood, rolling in the hay and leaping all over the place while Han did chores. But this was very grown up, less careless, more deliberate. 

The basket had a dull rusty discoloration to the wicker at the bottom: she assumed it was the right one and snatched it up just as enthusiastically as she could for something she didn’t want to be touching. 

By the time she came back to Ben the deed was done. 

She approached him too quietly because he flinched when he finally heard her. A clumsy hand lifted to wipe his eyes. She felt it immediately. Death. 

He didn’t stand up when she crouched at his side and took the lifeless thing from his hands and placed it carefully into the basket. Despite it being dead, and not feeling, she felt she needed to treat it gently almost for that exact reason. 

He wordlessly held up the knife and let the rain clean off the blood. While he seemed focused on that, her hand came up, and rested on his shoulder. She didn’t know what to do with it. Her body. Her touch. It was supposed to comfort and she didn’t know—

Leia used to rub her back, when she had nightmares. In slow circles. 

Rey’s hand moved in a flat circle on the surface of his back. Repeating the motion all these years later. Did Leia teach this thinking it would be used to comfort her son? Such kindnesses seemed to be taught to be shared. And then the only way Rey knew what to do at all was because it had been shared by his mother with her.

What felt different about it was all the rises and fall, the shape of it. She didn’t know what to say.

“When you wrote those books, and I was so awful,” he stared at the rain coating his knife and hand, now clean, “you wrote it like you loved me anyway. Not  _ anyway. _ For it: not in spite of it. And I was  _ trying _ to be a better man at the time.”

“I did.”

She admitted to all of it because admitting to them separately was too scary. And with both of them crouched in the mud and him crying. 

His hands were shaking. She could not imagine him as a farmer who was distraught to kill one of his chickens, even for a dinner that obviously meant something to him. 

She never could have pictured Ben as this person because she loved him too much to begin with and this man in front of her would have made her feel too much love to be able to bear.

Her voice was quiet and unsure as it reached for him:

“That’s one of the things that you’re angry at me about?”

He did look at her then, blinking the tears out of his eyes. There was something there that she had missed and it made her want to crawl backwards to the house. 

“I’m angry at myself. I lived like the person you knew was a completely different person from myself.” He flexed the tremors out of his hands, “We’re the same.”

She shook her head, but he tensed up beside her.

_ “We are.  _ I just didn’t accept him like you did.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s not something to be sorry for,” he stared at the ground, “it’s something I’d like to be forgiven for.”

“But I…”

Where was the place for her apology?

He wasn’t offering her one. She just had to make room for this inside herself, instead of casting her guilt away. It was harder to receive than to remove. She had to take a little more than she thought she could bear. 

Her tongue wet her lips.

Then Rey placed her hands on his closest shoulder for balance. And delicately, as she had done once or twice before in her life, she pressed her brow to his temple and took a moment close to him to breathe together. 

He was so solid under her hands: but the bones of his skull felt no less fragile than the bones of hers when they pressed together. 

Her plea from this morning rang in her ears as the chicken drained of blood into the earth beneath their feet:  _ help me figure out what’s wrong with me. _

Neither of them moved for a few minutes. 

So he didn’t give her something to apologize for. Why did that make this harder?

“I...forgive you,” it felt wrong and odd to say. 

But he hummed deep in his chest like it was what he needed to hear.

* * *

After a roast chicken, it certainly felt understood with the intention of being cared for. 

Kaydel wasn’t exactly the picture of domesticity, though Rey was hardly one to judge on that front. Ben’s sister-in-law did not beatifically craft every element of a fine meal. She bickered with Ben as he set the table for her. She cursed like a sailor whenever she checked on the contents of the oven. She took cigarette breaks outside, which was nothing like Leia’s domestic style. 

“I hope you don’t mind eating early,” Kaydel said, in a way that was refreshingly unapologetic. Because regardless of her hope: they were eating early, “I work this evening.”

Rey didn’t mind: she and Ben shared only the lightest breakfast before she had arrived and every smell was making her stomach squeeze, alertly empty.

Because Rey was a guest, or more likely because she was useless in the kitchen: she was offered many breaks to go off somewhere and rest herself. After the night she’d had: she took them. Feeling bruised from the moment shared over the slaughtered hen outside, Rey took the opportunity. Her hand ached from scrawling in pencil in the little notebook, but she kept at it for hours while dinner was being prepared: in the attic, in the library, carefully outside with it pressed flat to her knee so Ben wouldn’t catch her and make accusations. 

Her body was vibrating from what happened outside the barn. Especially after wandering back up to the attic for a lie-down when the chicken was in the oven, filling the house with smells. Ben had gone out to care for the animals, and there was conversation to be had with both him and Kaydel that Rey was avoiding. 

Her muscles thrumming from the closeness she had shared with him, the tip of her nose brushing his cheek—

The house was silent. And she was alone. 

She rarely did this. Even though she lived totally alone with just herself to judge her. It was so shameful. But from just thinking and writing, the words escaping her the second they were scrawled down, her body was stirred from her closeness with Ben and she could feel it between her legs, in the fabric of the fresh undergarments she was wearing. His voice was so fresh, and she would hear it more. She could go outside right now and speak with him! 

A helpless giggle fell from her lips.

She dropped her notebook and pencil to the side of the bed.

With a swallow and some denial, she slid her hands under her skirt to adjust where the silk clung to her cunt. 

There was no place for denial. She arched her throat helplessly and let her fingers slide along her seam. Just then her hair stirring on the pillows brought up the lingering scent of Ben.

_Oh._

Her hips rocked up as she petted herself. His body had been in this bed with her. She had never been this wound up in her life. Her thighs twitched around her hands as she hiked up that stranger's skirt and touch herself properly. 

Her body _sang_ for Ben. He could never know. He'd hate her. But it would do anything: sing, dance, crawl in that moment to have him slide into bed beside her again and want her like this. Not whatever memory he had of her as a girl. But this woman: this mess, this lonely thing who was both unmoored and anchored by her proximity to him. 

She'd give up every cent she'd earned from the books for him to want her as she was. Even a miserable young spinster who only caused him so much trouble. That was impossible, so she removed herself from guilt for her naughtiness in that it was her small consolation. 

With a hitch pitched sound and really no time at all, she was unwound on the bed, panting, and her limbs heavy and warm from the ripples that radiated inside her. There was something comforting about dinner in the oven, and Ben tending the farm, her publisher in London thought she was missing, and the world was still turning like it didn't make a difference that Rey was there at all. 

* * *

But a full belly and the lingering smell of spice and the effort Ben made to light candles in the dining room led to a feeling Rey wasn't sure she’d ever shared before. They were cast in companionable darkness: all finished with the food, but with no intention to move straight away. The end result was so whole and complete there was no memory of how chaotic the young woman’s process was. 

“Catherine taught me,” Kaydel demurred without being asked about the talent behind the meal, and a warm sadness overtook the room, “she taught me everything I’d need to know when she and Ben got engaged, because she wouldn’t be there to take care of me anymore. I think she’d like to know that I would use it to take care of him when she couldn’t be here either.”

Ben gave Kaydel a watery smile. It was vulnerable, and something that he didn’t hide from Rey. Merely a day ago it seemed like she would be coldly excluded from this honest display, that he would remove himself entirely before he let her know it was there. 

Now it was just sadness. Freely offered to be heard. Which took some generosity that was surprisingly rare to Rey.

There was another understanding that could not be discussed yet: that this was what it was. A kindness. And that this same gesture had been used by other women to try and gain his attention for selfish reasons. 

The difference hadn’t been clear until she felt this.

No wonder Ben was so doubtful of outsiders coming to care for him. He certainly had to question this, and an obvious kinship he had with Catherine’s sister, and had to decipher the differences that made this a selfless act and from the others a selfish one.

The fact that anyone used their mother’s chicken recipe to make this something seductive, duplicitous, made her full stomach turn. 

“I think Catherine’s intention was for me to take care of myself without her here,” his voice was low and steady, which she had never perceived in his sadness before, “but I appreciate it.”

The dynamic between them was that of siblings: which felt odd to Rey as the closest thing she had to a sibling was Ben. And even Kaydel and Ben seemed more like siblings than she and Ben had. There was no  _ need _ from each other. Just companionship.

It made her jealous. It made her self-conscious. It made her feel she didn’t understand herself nearly as well as she thought she always had.

Rey delicately placed her napkin beside her plate. 

“How did you meet Catherine?”

It felt safer to have this conversation supervised. Even if Ben looked a little dubious when she asked.

Interest flickered through her. The exact definition of morbid curiosity. It was like a tongue worrying the burnt skin of a gum. The attraction to pain for pain’s sake. 

Kaydel turned to him as if to verify the details:

“She was back from school…”

“She came home one Christmas,” he concluded very curtly, “back from University.”

_ “Archeology Major,” _ Kaydel added, very proudly.

_ Home from school. _ Rey tried to withhold the bitterness. While she was not coming home from school: someone else did, and Ben saw her, and they were married. While she was running errands somewhere abroad for Holdo and being told to wear tweed so men would leave her alone, someone else could go  _ home _ and be loved. 

“We’d met before in the village—at the time I was waiting for—but it just...wasn’t what I expected when I saw her again.”

Kaydel smiled at him teasingly, “She’d benefited from the fashions she learned while away at school. Ben almost set himself on fire on the candles during Christmas Eve Mass.”

Ben chuckled abashedly to himself, and then glanced abruptly at Rey as if he shouldn’t be telling her this.

She didn’t take her eyes away.

“She sent me a very kind letter…” Rey’s voice cracked, and then she found it again, speaking very slowly as they glanced at her in surprise, “after you two were married. I think I would have liked her.”

“You would have,” Ben said easily, “she was studying the Abbey while she lived here. She’d made some amazing findings out on the site. It was her personal project, and she liked how cleverly you added local history into your books. Her notes would have been a fine resource.” 

Rey stiffened at his tone. It was distant again. Formal. Perhaps even dismissive. 

As if people existed to her to be resources and he offered assurance that Catherine would have been one. 

“She was fascinated by your books, she’d always tease Ben about them,” Kaydel smiled genuinely at Rey, but her ease and something under the surface in Ben beside her made it clear that his distaste for her writing was not something Kaydel was aware of. 

And even though Catherine had said as much in her letter: something was making heat flame in her cheeks knowing that Ben’s wife had read her books. 

“They’re just silly fantasy stories,” Rey replied meekly, wanting to melt into her chair. “I hardly remember those days…”

He blinked at her until she sat still. 

He could smell lies. 

His sister-in-law didn’t notice them.

“Catherine thought she had sorted me out before she went to school, but before she got married, that was such a battle for me. I wanted her to do it because it was better when she did. It made me feel like someone would always take care of me. I wish I had paid more attention because what I do remember her showing me during that time means everything now…”

Kaydel’s eyes got shiny.

“Anyway, Ben’s been  _ family, _ ever since. I’d go mad without him.”

He shifted in his seat and raised his eyebrows at her.

“When you get married, you have to teach me how to roast a chicken.”

Conflict flared through Rey. She was happy for him. She was devastated for him. She would no sooner want to take that happiness away than she would cut off her own hand. That his happiness, it would now seem, was found in spite of her actions… 

“And seduce some young widow with it,” Rey added absently.

Kaydel raised her eyebrows. Rey would take that reaction over the daggers Ben was staring at her. 

“A bad joke,” Rey added, waving her hands in front of her in surrender. 

Kaydel sniffled with a smile, as if the thought of a joke, even a bad one, was a nice thing for Rey to have provided them. 

She glanced out the window at the darkening sky. The rain had not let up and storm clouds were gaining in the distance. One pair of eyes were on the weather and then all three were: all of them sensing with dread what it looked like was coming.

“I work the desk of the hotel tonight. We do have out-of-town guests,” she puffed up like this was a grand event, “so I should get going.”

Ben glanced around the table. 

“Rey and I can clean up. Do you need me to walk you?”

His sister-in-law shrugged him off like the idea was ridiculous and she didn’t need to consider it for a moment to conclude it was so. 

“There’s still some light. I’ll race over.”

She patted Ben’s shoulder and like the last flashes of a sunset, when she was gone from the room it was like it was left in darkness. The subject she had left them on was too loaded for either of them to move yet. 

Rey cleared her throat. It seemed like a good time to talk: or for him to provide her something to apologize for. But he did not. 

Ben got out of his seat and started mixing a cocktail.

“Why are you embarrassed?” He asked quietly, not looking at her as he gave himself a heavy pour.

Did this have to be uncomfortable, did this need to hurt, out of respect for the dead?

“I’m not embarrassed.”

“I would hope not, since you published those books for anyone to read”

Rey blinked hot, humiliated tears out of her eyes. The pleasantness of the evening had begun to ebb away: but not the warmth. That intensified. The warmth was uncomfortable, unbearable even.

It was heat.

Ben stared at her in silence for a moment, then moved through the room with purpose. His gait was loose and unsteady. Maybe he needed to be in bed. But instead he prowled across the room and plucked a book  _ -her book- _ where Leia had proudly displayed in the window for all to see. 

“Honestly thought you meant to curse me,” he murmured, quietly to himself. Then he licked his fingertips and the pages flapped under their searching flicks. 

Rey shut her eyes in dread and premature shame. She had really hoped of all the things they would never speak of: they wouldn’t ever speak of this.

He was really doing this.

Of course he knew the page to search for. 

_ “While their eyes were torn from each other by his Uncle’s shout, Rey knew her curiosity was not satisfied. As they fled the interruption down the hill of the Abbey, their cheeks bright like the color of summer strawberries, Rey kept at Ben’s side. _

_ ‘I promise if I ever kiss anyone, it’ll be you.’  _

_ A hint of redness appeared at the tips of his ears.  _

_ ‘Why me?’ _

_ Her expression was all at once wise, trusting, and quizzical.  _

_ ‘Who else would it be?’ she told Ben firmly, even though their chance today for it was spoilt. Her heart was pounding. _

_ ‘Another one will come,’ Ben said with a wise, wild grin at her, as if he had read her mind, ‘I can count on it.’” _

_ His hand coiled sure and true around hers, and together they kept running.” _

Rey herself turned not the color of a strawberry, but of a beet. She clearly hadn’t enough shame to simply  _ not write it. _ She only regretted the words now, with Ben peering darkly over the edge of the book at her. Like she had written them as a promise herself, and not coming from the girl in the book. 

What startled her most was hearing her words from his lips: it could have been a dream once, to hear him read her stories aloud. Now her whole body flamed from the humiliation that  _ this _ was the only thing he read that he wanted to talk about.

A kiss that never happened. 

No matter how troublesome: writing always made her feel less lonely. It was something that existed outside of how things didn’t work out.

“Then two books later she kisses someone else.”

Her eyes lifted from their mortified stare at the table. She had managed to go limp to just take whatever it was he was going to be angry about: but surprise injected a new tension into the argument that made her straighten up. 

“What?”

He kept staring at her, a fascinatingly offended look on his face. 

_ “Jaime.” _

Rey groaned and her whole face twisted up annoyance. It couldn’t be both. He hated that she wrote about them  _ talking _ about kissing: he hated that the kiss happened with someone. 

She was inches away from telling him he had to pick one thing to be angry about at a time. The kiss or that it didn’t happen. 

“She kisses some little prick named Jaime who waltzes in at the end of her story and doesn’t truly matter for any of it.”

“Ben, _ it’s a book,” _ the heels of her palms came up to cover her eyes. He truly was placed on this earth just to vex her to death. “The publisher wanted her to have a romance, and after you were so angry about the first book, I could hardly find it in myself to continue on with it. We came to a compromise. One I can’t believe, when this Ben is freed from obligation to  _ that _ Rey, you still take issue with.”

All this talk of kisses that she didn’t even have was exhausting.

“I’m sorry that it was out there for your wife to read,” she glared at him, “that two foolish  _ children _ found some affection and hope in their future alongside each other in a story. I assumed you’d just tell her I’m a daft old bird who never married and needed to make things interesting and you’d laugh about it together.”

He looked at her quizzically.

“Does my marriage bother you?”

“No,” Rey replied simply with her arms crossed, “and my kiss shouldn’t bother you.”

He looked it though. Deeply bothered. 

If asked before, she would not have said that claiming him in her exclusive affections by cursing him with her words was ever her intention. 

But since she had not succeeded in claiming him, there was no denying some intention in those actions. Even if it wasn’t his future.

She had wanted his past. If not her own: his.

“You weren’t at the wedding.”

She let out a shocked laugh.

“You didn’t want me there. You would have mended the rift between us if you had. Your  _ mother _ invited me. Not you.”

Ben was raw, scrubbing a hand over his face so hard the skin reddened. He wasn’t being a bastard on purpose. This was getting to him, cutting deep. Rey could not replace what once was. If she knew it, and didn’t try, what was going to save him from the pain he couldn’t deal with? 

She stared at the empty plate in front of her. This dinner was proof of all she was missing. So much to be shared, so much to take away.

“I could have been  _ happy _ for you if there was any place for me here. But there wasn’t.”

What if there had? What if he had begrudgingly shared this part of himself with her, extended an invitation back home that she’d been waiting for all these years? Would she wear a nice dress to the wedding and smile and not end up crying in the bathtub like she had when she first learned of the news of his engagement?

Would that have ruined the love she had for him: watered it down, made it less, changed it into something more manageable for the way things worked out? 

The honorable way was often the most painful: which is why they had avoided it out of fear up until now. Perhaps it was a lie she could have been brave enough to face it those years ago. 

“Was Jaime a source of your happiness?”

She blinked at him in confusion.

_ “What?” _

He cleared his throat and set down the book. Now he looked embarrassed. 

“You know. Someone better suited to Rey.”

Rey’s hand came up to cover her mouth. Of course he would assume there was an existing real-life correlation, that there was some living and breathing form of Rey’s impulsive and daring love interest, Jaime. Who was Ben but a real-life correlation wondering who was on the other side of the path that had split from her. 

For some reason she didn’t want to give him everything. Ever satisfaction that came with the truth. 

“Suddenly you can’t read?”

He raised his eyebrows at her, and she gestured to the book he had taken up.

“It’s all there, you said so yourself. She kisses Jaime when he’s wounded and it’s all very nice and I’m sure that everyone likes him.”

All it was was a blank composite of a hero who Rey longed to be allowed by her publisher to just kill anyway. A nothing. 

“Everyone likes him for Rey.”

It’s not the way to phrase a question but it’s said like one. Rey swallowed and looked into his eyes. Warm and sad. 

“Probably.”

“What do you think of him?”

_ Nothing. _

Because she was willing to live without it. Touch wasn’t a part of the spinster author. The story lived richly and she lived sparsely as a vessel to the story. 

But she didn’t want to tell Ben that for some reason she couldn’t explain. It was too much to admit that if she couldn’t have Ben’s kiss, she wouldn’t have one at all, especially to someone who had been  _ married. _

“I’m perfectly capable of making things up, too,” she said sadly. “Do I look like a Skywalker?”

She stood up from the table. 

That name became a cloak to keep as much in as it did out. 

Ben moved as if he was going to get closer to her, but kept himself away when she flinched. 

The clouds in the distance did not make this conversation easier. In fact, the aims of her responses now seemed to just rush them along to an end.

“It looks like it’s going to storm. Don’t worry, I can get myself into a bed tonight. I’m sorry. It was thoughtless. My publisher is talking about a reprint of the first book: maybe I can see to it your name is changed in future editions.”

She lifted her eyes to him with a small gasp.

“I’m sorry,” she repeated, having been given the realization, “this is one of the things you’re angry about.  _ I’m sorry. _ I should have just said that from the start.”

It didn’t feel as resolved as all that. Even as he stared at her now, he opened his mouth, and closed it, and it was clear the matter wasn’t finished. 

She left him to his drink.

  
  


* * *

It didn’t exactly happen like how it appeared in the book. 

It was a windy day, and they were running away from Luke. But they hadn’t been caught about to have their first kiss and startled away like frightened birds. 

Ben and his Uncle had an argument when he found them up at the Abbey. It was strange, because he was the only adult to encourage the search for the sword. 

“If anyone could do it, it’s you two together,” he’d always say, and a tension would form in Ben’s body and his expression would sour. This all happened once again on an unseasonably chilly summer day, the wind dancing a fast jig around their hair and clothing, the sound of it surrounding them like a raucous party where everything needed to be spoken in a yell. 

He left the ruins in a huff and Rey trailed after him. They were not hand-in-hand. 

She couldn’t understand why he became so angry and bitter when Luke talked about the Skywalker sword.

It was like Luke’s words separated them, and that was too much to bear. It fractured a bond that was so invisible and strong, obvious yet too fragile to mention. Calling after him would slow him down, the grasses flattening and arching in the breeze. 

She stumbled on a stone on the steep incline of the hill. Then he stopped acting like he was ignoring her. He caught her so easily it was clear that even when he pretended she didn’t exist, he was completely aware of her. 

She clung to him for balance, her legs buckling, and looked up at him to expect to see wrath.

This was long after their tussles felt like they were balanced. When she was aware of him and their differences. The time had come that she knew her weight wouldn’t drag him down with her. 

He still gave her the option of hurting him: but it wasn’t a tempting blow in the places he left open to her. There was a vulnerability in him in her final year at the farm that vibrated like electricity and scared her as much as lightning. 

She was still in his arms when that door, to hurt him, or to do something else entirely, when he righted her on her feet and leaned down. 

He moved very slowly. Too slowly. No one wants a slow death, to see it approach from a distance. Her heart was frantic, and even on the most familiar-feeling day of the year, it felt like everything was going to change all at once.

His eyes on hers told her he wasn’t scared. And now that he had her in a place like this, he sighed like this was where he wanted her. So obvious was his serenity that his eyes closed as he nearly leaned in to close the final distance—

Rey dragged the strands of hair that the wind had lashed flatly across her cheek out of her eyes and mouth. 

_ “I’m not ready.” _

Ben lurched away as if burned. 

Luke did not stop them, and what happened, that day. Rey didn’t say  _ no, _ or  _ never, _ or  _ impossible.  _ And it was more likely they left each other in anger because Ben understood that. The kiss she couldn’t have given him became a rend, a wound, then a scar.

It was everything that wasn’t done yet. 

It was why he’d never forgive her for leaving before it was through. 

And if it was ever unclear to him what she meant: it would always exist as she saw it in some way, happened somehow, in the very first story she wrote about them.

  
  


* * *

By the time she was in her slip, under the quilt, the storm overtook the house and the shivering returns. 

Up on the hill the winds always encompassed every wall. But it was the worst in the attic: the roof rattling with the rain, the skylight warping light under the running water, and the peak of the rafters seeming to be twisted around and around with the gales. 

Rey bundled up tight under the covers. Like she had as a child. Sometimes Leia came upstairs and rubbed her back or her small, socked feet when these storms terrified her. She sang to Rey her mother’s lullabies, which were beautiful and bruisingly sad, and sometimes summoned Ben up from his room downstairs to wait out the storm with them. 

He’d watch her shiver with his black eyes: nearly invisible in how silent he was. 

She thought that maybe he’d look at her and hold her hand. What would happen if he did.

Her eyes wandered the room in circles, imagining him in the corner while Leia patiently read from a book. His hand.

This was not the time to be frightened like a child. Rey was an adult now. 

And a clap of thunder made her flinch like it was going to strike her every single time. That queasy feeling from their argument had kept her shoulders tight. She let her hair fall over her face and just hang there. 

Catherine was kind. She wrote Rey a letter and almost seemed to want Rey to be here for a visit. Unlike everyone else. 

So why did it hurt so much to hear that Catherine had read her books and teased Ben about kisses that he could have insisted, as her husband, never even happened in real life, and never even happened in  _ fiction? _

She felt so silly and childish, shaking like a dog in a storm, holding a kiss sacred in her story when other women came up this hill with the intent to express carnal desires to a broken widower, and what they all found was a smart-mouthed farmer who was stocked in leftovers and company by his foul-mouthed sister-in-law.

The moment was preserved because she loved it and in preserving it, it could be dug up to hurt her. Was the past worth burning so it didn’t bring up all this pain?

She kept her quilt tight around her shoulders, her face buried in her pillow, her spine arched and trembling. She was buried so deep in her defenses that when Ben came to her bedside and rested his hand on her shoulder, she wailed. 

“Rey... _ Rey.” _

When she twisted under her covers to look up at him, he knelt. 

“It’s like no time has passed at all,” he said of this and only this, a sad smile on his face while he watched her shake. “I had hoped this would go away.”

Thunder rumbled deep in the hills and a sob escaped her throat in answer. Ben sighed and lifted up the quilt. 

Last night felt odd enough to have been an accident they would never mention again. That he returned tonight was something stranger between them. Deliberate intention over unplanned circumstance.

“Let me…”

The efforts of wrenching the blankets from her grasp revealed her upper body in her sheer white slip. He very robotically peeled the sheet from the quilt and covered her back up. 

“Scoot,” he whispered, and she moved to his command. Then he steered her around again. “Edge of the bed, unless you want to be trapped up against the wall.”

_ Did she? _

Another rumble in the distance. No. No she did not. 

"You didn't have to—"

He spooned behind her, above the sheet that covered her, a wall of flesh and bone that softened the prickling fear the wind outside had caused. She buried her face back into the pillow as he gently stroked her arm. 

"But I will," he rumbled gently up against her back, louder than thunder. Stormier than rain.

With just the two of them in the house: memory was fading of what they had even argued about. The kiss? The wedding? Things that couldn’t be changed: and what was even less able to be changed was they would not have to live with one another. 

It was odd because of all things that seemed like a choice, it should have been that. But it wasn’t.

“What’s all this?”

She had her eyes pinched shut until she heard the flap of crisp pages. 

_ Blast. _ He’d found her notebook.

“Just...scribblings.”

It was inopportune to say the least that after arguing about her writing he’d find more of it in the works in his own home.

Her teeth dug into her lip as he paged through the notebook, at first in denial that there was anything incriminating on the pages, until memory served to give her a line or two to blush about him seeing.

Then she frantically grabbed for her book: but he held it out of reach.

“I was reading,” he informed her dryly, flipping a page. 

She struggled in his arms until he pressed her down, gently, to her bed in a way that was not a suggestion but a demand. 

“I think you’ve done enough reading tonight.”

“I just can’t put your work down.”

All this was very much a contest over her body: one she felt she was losing. But a game she was a player in, losing and capable of winning, nonetheless. 

She grit her jaw up at him.

“I thought you didn’t want to be... _ seduced…” _

It was ridiculous to voice when she was shaking like a newborn calf next to him in the bed, no matter how sheer her slip was. He was in no danger of feminine wiles from her. 

But the proximity did demand to be remarked upon. 

His hand stilled. A light, low laugh sounded in his chest. Then he sighed, and it moved her whole body and the bed beneath her. 

“I promise, I now know for certain that you’re not trying to seduce me.”

He swept her hair off her neck and kept stroking her as the thunder rolled. When he brought himself close: she got her first good look at him since dinner.

“Were you... _ crying?” _

He batted one hand over a runny red eye. 

“Happens. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” she settled into the bed, now trying to make him more comfortable when he looked embarrassed. 

Nervously, she ran a thumb over his cheekbone. He grumbled to himself but leaned into her touch. Touch was oddest in how automatic it was. That their bodies felt free when their spirits certainly did not.

_ What were they doing? _

“You were wrong, you know. If there was ever a place for you, it was here.”

She had hoped he would not bring up the argument downstairs. When she said things she had hoped he wouldn’t pry into. Because he sensed it even when he agreed: he could offer what he was angry about. She would hide it from him. 

The echo of her words and the calm he applied to his voice to speak them, like he had discovered something, made her twitch with discomfort. 

“Stop. It’s not the same.”

She had been sent away. She had been forgotten. She had been replaced. 

Maybe it was that: or how if she closed her eyes when he spoke, she almost heard Leia.

“No?” He replied innocently, and then as cleverly as could be, his hand disappeared under the blanket. One of his fingers stroked the strap of her slip, riding down her ribs. “How so?”

The room went white from a flash of lightning and Rey tensed her entire body up for a thunderous cry to follow. 

From the sky, not from her. 

His finger kept slowly stroking her bare skin until the noise passed and she had enough sense to squirm. 

_ “Oh,”  _ she breathed as his touch skimmed her sternum, narrowly avoiding her breast. The feeling was itchy and irritating and the only solutions she could find for it did not at all involve him stopping. 

“Different how?”

Her question was just an exhale: a release of a breath that was held by terror and now flew out of her lungs

_ “Wuh—?” _

There was a curious insistence in his answering touch. If he shifted his hand a little more he’d be cradling her. A finger made a little circle near enough to her nipple to have her thinking of it on her nipple.

Rey dug her nails into his arm. He pried her claws out patiently, that finger still circling as she squirmed.

This was unbearable. If Rey had read a book where the man crawled into the bed of a woman and touched her breast, well, she’d concretely know this was a scene about sex. But sex didn’t even seem to exist in the future of this torture. It couldn’t feel like this: people wouldn’t be able to go on about their lives at all if this was just the feeling of  _ one _ bodily touch. Sex as she knew it had to exist somewhere wherever he stopped this terrible feeling tickling across her skin and finally took his mount atop her. Sex, once terrifying to her, seemed all well and good if it meant this agony on her prickling skin would end. 

What she felt was more terrifying than whatever duty sex seemed like to her from a distance. A duty not required of a spinster writer. 

Her knees came up to her chest, which shielded nothing of her but her belly. He got his way around them, even tangled in them, and was undeterred as he took her nipple between his fingers.

“Should I stop?”

Ben’s tone was too innocent.

He seemed to be teasing an answer where she  _ would _ tell him to stop: because his hand grew bolder.

How funny it was that if he knew what she had done that afternoon, he'd know her only fear was him doing this to her and then stopping. 

“Or do you like it?”

She  _ adored _ it.

His question kept her pinned. Of course they weren’t children anymore. Of course it wasn’t the same to have a man come to her bed to soothe her as she trembled over his touch, her fear, and bloody lightning.

But this crooked humor, holding something over her head out of reach and how she waited for every torturous moment of it, was like nothing had changed between them at all. He exposed a side of himself that no one else knew at all. 

And if that wasn’t changed, what would she do?

_ “Ben.” _

She didn’t mean to whine. 

“Hmm?”

She turned over on the bed and instead wrapped herself around him. His exploratory touch ceased as he tightened his arms around her. 

“I’m  _ scared,”  _ she growled into the curve of his shoulder, “that’s never new.”

“But you’ve made such a remarkable life at my expense. What do you have to be scared of?”

Another pitch of lightning. His tone mocked: but his arms were sure around her body.

She glanced up to try and weigh the two conflicting reactions from him. His eyes were calm. She kept her head on the pillow beside his instead of hiding away. For a moment they just looked at each other. 

“Don’t say it.”

“Say what?” 

The first genuine laugh fell from his lips: surprised, but soft. 

Rey pursed her lips and watched him laugh for a moment too long. His eyes were closed, so his nose almost brushed hers without him noticing. It was shocking to see him vulnerable and open like this. 

Hadn’t she come here expecting him to be broken?

It prompted her to answer even though she hadn’t wanted to:

_ “Don’t write a book about this, Rey,” _ she intoned in a mocking voice that was a shade too deep to be a perfect imitation.

He laughed again, this time chastened by their surroundings, aware of himself.

“At least let me read it first.”

She shifted beside him. Ben reading her work was so intimate. Especially when he saw sides of herself she wasn’t exactly sure she liked. She always wrote like she was talking to herself. Otherwise, it would feel too much like talking directly to him, when she could not, and that was unbearable.

“You never mention a fear of lightning in your books,” he mused, “and there  _ are _ storms.”

“That’s just for people who...know me.”

“Ah,” he reached for her and plucked her still-hard nipple through the thin fabric of her slip. It felt like she was going to burst for him, her body arching for more,  _ “Like I do.” _

She yelped when he pressed her firmly into the mattress. Her notebook came between them, fanned open and spread to reveal the pages across her chest. Even if she was shocked by his quickness, her thighs similarly fanned open to allow him to lie between. 

A gasp left her as she looked up at him, practically using her as a desk to go through her writing. She tried to close the book, but he pinned her hands. 

“I’m in these notes,” he tilted his head curiously, his eyes on her words where they sat written in cursive as pert and alert as her nipples, propped open between her breasts. “My arms seem to be, in the very least.”

“Don’t.”

“Mhmm,” he ran his thumbs over her arched rib cage. He should be the one feeling self-conscious from her writing. At least, that had always been her understanding that it was much more invasive to be written about. But the details he was finding her noticing, the things he teased and resented her for, were truly more revealing of herself than she had planned. 

“No mention of any Jaime.”

She snorted.

“I can’t believe you’re jealous.”

He glanced down at her with amusement in his eyes. “Why not?”

_ Because you were married.  _

“I haven’t exactly…”

“Haven’t  _ what, _ Rey?”

There was the honest answer. That one was too unbearable for this moment. It would lead to a rush to make something real. 

And then there was the true answer:

“Been destroyed by the thought of someone else loving you.”

He sucked in a breath. This close to her it felt like he was stealing her air. Now  _ he _ was shivering, and she couldn’t help but wonder if there was still lightning?

Her hand lifted to touch his sternum. If he was going to get so comfortable with her chest. Fingers spread over the bulk of him, and he took another deep breath. She wondered to herself if there would be enough air left in the world for the two of them. 

“Because I wrote the books so you couldn’t be taken away from me.”

He blinked at her, dazed, pressing closer as if resting the weight of himself into her touch.

“I know.”

He reached over to the bedside table and snatched up her pencil from where it had sat next to the notebook. Then his free hand spread to hold open the book.

“What are you doing?”

“Maybe I can write about you,” he glanced at her with a fever in his eyes, “and that’ll be  _ mine.” _

The declaration of ownership stole her breath. 

There was a tickle, an itch, that rode along the tip of the pencil against her body as he scrawled on the pages. Whether he was merely making a point or not: being pinned like a butterfly to a cork board and then observed, made note of, made her squirm. He was so massive over her. His thighs bracketing her hips, his large chest hunched forward as if she were going to fly away any moment. 

“What are you writing?”

“Maybe I’ll make you wait to find out until it’s published.”

Thunder crashed against the earth outside. Rey arched and covered her face with her hands. His body kept her from bucking too violently. He kept up writing methodically. That dance of pencil tracing along her body.

“You’re safe,” he assured her, his own body formed a shelter from the storm above that rattled against the roof. She gulped and set her shaking hands on his arms. The muscles jerked as he wrote, but otherwise were undeterred by her touch. 

He was trying to be so villainous, like in her books, and he couldn’t hide how much concern flowed through him when she was genuinely frightened. That was Ben. It didn’t matter that in an incomplete story, she had taken him to some dark place that was not unfamiliar to them. But she didn’t take him to some place he couldn’t come back from. 

She wasn’t going to leave him in the dark. 

Her shaking hands collected his left one, the one not writing, to her breast. She secured his thumb and forefinger around her nipple and keened when he pressed them together.

“Good heroes have nowhere to go,” it was not as off-topic as she initially sounded, despite the surprised look he gave her,  _ “and they bore me.” _

The pencil went still when she lowered her voice. He swallowed. 

"You like bad men?"

His voice lowered to tease in a way she had never heard before. It made her close her eyes and gasp, completely open to him.

Her little nub of flesh worried thoughtfully between his fingers. She whimpered at the sensual slide of silk under his touch. 

She wet her lips to regain her composure to speak. 

_That's what it was,_ it occurred to her in a moment of perfect clarity, _why it was so wonderful._ He made her feel cared for.

Rey shook her head and he looked stricken down at her.

“You didn’t like the way I wrote you as a wicked boy who would stay that way because you never saw your own redemption coming. But I did.”

He sat up off her, her heart beating against her empty breast, the improvised stationary collected to her chest in his splayed hand. The skin of her nipple was singing from loss of its touch. Longing to sing for him again.

Her arms crossed in front of her as he sat back. Conflicted. 

“He was never a bad man. It was always coming,” she whispered with tears in her eyes.  _ “I saw it.” _

The next blast of thunder was so loud Rey let out a whimper. It took her out of the room. Out of the year. She was in one place and it was a place before she ever had him.

Ben’s shaking hands were already dropping the book and pencil to gather her into his body to hold through the night. She wrapped her legs around him, buried her fingers into his hair, and held him back: the man she saw in the child and the person she never stopped loving.

* * *

“A thirteen-year-old is a kaleidoscope of different personalities, if not in most ways a mere figment of her own imagination. At that age, what and who you are depends largely on what book you happen to be reading at the moment.”

Jessica Mitford,  _ Hons and Rebels _

  
  
  



	10. Chapter 10

_ The perfect halo _

_ Of gold hair and lightning _

_ Sets you off against _

_ The planet's last dance _

* * *

“Luke?”

This was going to be an awkward conversation. Rey blinked at the sunny swirl of dust filling her office. Flipping through the old books hadn’t given her anything she could use. 

It was nothing she didn’t know. But it still hurt. 

Ancestry records were the most brutal part of research, personal research. She supposed she could just make something up for  _ Rey in the Dales, _ no one would care if she was a secret princess or something equally ridiculous, but she wanted it—

She wanted it to feel real somehow.

Connected.

“Yes?”

He gave no indication if he knew he was speaking to. There was an air about it, even over the telephone. He was  _ being contacted. _ That seemed to be her job to get what she needed from him without his help. 

“I’m doing research,” she tried to keep herself as professional in tone as possible, “and I’m— _ nobody. _ There’s nothing. And my editor keeps asking about it.”

If her tone sounded pained, the old man ignored it.

There was a gruff sound on the other side of the phone. 

“That can’t exactly be helped.”

She bit her front teeth together, tongue slithering between the edges, as she held back what she wanted to shout over the phone at the old man with the name of a  _ knight _ who just sat in squalor in an old stone hut.

“But you see, it can, if I only had your permission—”

“What do you want, Rey?”

She sat back in her chair, tilting her head up to the ceiling. She sighed. Might as well just be honest. 

“It’s for my book. I need to name myself.”

* * *

The next morning the bed felt too big. 

When she rolled over, she fell against the empty side of the mattress as hard as one would fall against stone. Rey opened her eyes.

He wasn’t there. 

Ben had held her until she had fallen asleep in his arms. Then he must have left at some point that night. 

She was stunned in horror that he had left her. 

It stung so deep her body curved forward, falling in on itself, and she could not straighten her spine as she held herself perfectly still in bed. If she kept perfectly still, held her breath, maybe he would resume his place behind her and hope she didn’t notice his absence. She would pretend not to notice his absence if he just came back. It could all continue on as if it never happened if he returned in five minutes. Ten minutes. She ended up waiting an hour, ss all of her pride was gone. 

With no lack of effort, she finally lifted her head from the sheets and blinked around the room. It was early. The skylight cast the room in a gray glow. Storm clouds twisted overhead. 

And he left her. 

Numb, Rey stumbled out of bed and pulled on the dark sweater and the borrowed skirt. The garment drowned her shaking shoulders. They had fallen asleep against each other, soft skin mushed in shameless proximity like a basket full of puppies. He had been holding her so close and he let go. She wandered the house, hoping maybe she’d find him digging in a closet with all the contents strewn around him, and he’d turn to her with an old kite in his hands and he’d only left her to find it for them to fly together. 

Did she dare call out to him? The house betrayed signs of life so well. She’d hear him in the kitchen, she’d know his footsteps.

The house was frightfully empty. 

Rey entered Leia’s office with such a wretched feeling in her throat. She plucked at papers on the desk, knowing they wouldn’t find Ben for her, but feeling like she should be looking through something.

A page that had familiar handwriting caught her eye. The hand that wrote it had written something else that had hurt her before. 

Squinting, she lifted the page from the desk. 

It was a sketch of the Abbey, where she had not been able to go yet during her return. She hadn’t seen it since she was a child. Notes dotted the edges of the sketch.  _ Stone, _ the word  _ stone _ underlined so many times. 

Catherine’s notes. 

There was something aching inside her to see the stacks of them, all notes on the Skywalkers, information that Rey had to pluck from her memory that she had been told. 

Even for Ben to have this on a desk in his home. So much knowledge about his own family. To possess a history, instead of feeling like a ghost without a past. 

Rey swallowed and sat down with the pages spread out in front of her. One lifted automatically into her hands because the sketch on it was so uncanny, so familiar, that she had to look at it.

The drawing of the stone altar in the empty cathedral. It was a cracked, busted thing now but according to Luke, had been used for all kinds of ancient ceremonies. It was a nice place to sit down under the stone arches and look out on the moors. Not a bad place to eat a sandwich and bicker with Ben, either. 

She slapped the papers down onto the desk. Her stomach growled. She might as well eat. 

She went to the kitchen that Ben had straightened up from Kaydel’s chaotic domesticity. She dug the leftover chicken out of the refrigerator and did Han the complete disservice of not elevating it into a part of any greater whole. Just ripped chunks off the bone and stuffed them, cold, into her mouth and chewed them robotically. 

Wiping tears from her cheeks with the back of her greasy hand. 

When she was finished, she sniffed, and felt uncomfortably full. With a sigh, she went to the stove and started the kettle. 

She should have started with tea to relax, but relaxation was a low priority over emptiness. She didn’t want to look out the windows: maybe he’d gone on a walk and would come back as if nothing had changed. 

She focused on her tea. It was warm in her hands and brushing steam along her face and calming her stomach. 

She just focused on breathing and taking slow sips.

The door banged open with little ceremony.

Ben looked worse than she thought he would. Bits of hay were hanging out of the weave of his sweater. He groaned as he took off his muddy boots.

He went first to the sink to wash his hands. Without a single word as to where he was. She clutched her tea and tried not to shake.

“I didn’t want to wake you. The cow was giving birth. Something wasn’t right. I stayed in the barn since sunrise because I feared she’d die.”

Rey finally lifted her eyes to him.

_ “Pardon?” _

Ben took her elbow and pointed out the window over the sink. She peered at the pasture. Sure enough, a little white calf was wobbling around in the mud next to a relieved-looking cow.

Her brow furrowed with concern for a moment. But it looked alright, as she was sure his presence accounted for.

His expression was gentle. Everything had changed for him last night just as she felt everything had changed again when she woke up without him. 

“I could have held onto you for days but I’m still just a farmer.”

“Wonderful,” she murmured, ignoring the obvious heat in his words, watching those skinny white legs work for the first time had a way of making her forget what she was upset about. “Is the cow alright?”

He hovered over her shoulder and seemed to be determining her reaction. 

“The cow is healthy,” he looked down at her curiously. “As is little Rey.”

There was a gesture indicating to the calf outside. Her namesake. 

He was trying to make her laugh. It wasn’t coming. While he was gone for too legitimate a reason to still be angry at him, she wasn’t happy with herself for being so wounded by it.

He brushed his elbow against hers. 

“Where did you think I was?”

She sipped her tea and shrugged. Ben waited.

The answer was too terrible to say out loud. After a few minutes of silence, watching the calf approach the cow and begin to nurse, Ben placed his hand on the small of her back.

_ “I’m not leaving you,” _ he said quietly, and pressed a kiss to her temple. 

It was obviously intended as more casual than it came across. 

Her hands came up and clasped over her mouth because something was going to come out. She held them there as if in prayer until his arms banded around her. 

_ “Hush,” _ he whispered, soothing, skating his lips over the crown of her head, “I’m here.”

She tried very hard to breathe like a normal person. It was very easy to shield herself in this house and pretend not a single other thing existed in the world. But his existence, and all the ways it could hurt her, was too much in that moment.

“Why are you shivering?”

She bowed her face over the mug she was still holding and shook her head.

“Rey.”

He watched her for a moment, wrapped around her with his belly at her hip, and seemed to be considering something. 

Then he bowed and pressed his lips to her cheek very pointedly.

“Is  _ this _ why you shake?”

She shut her eyes and set the mug down before she dropped it.

_ “Please.” _

The mist of his breath filled her ear.

“It’s haunted me for a while, you know. I know what these fingers have done,” he raised one of her hands to his lips and kissed her knuckles, forever gnarled by religious use of her typewriter. The accusation made her blood run cold. Did he know about yesterday afternoon? Did he see it in her listless body, or how loosely she held her shoulders when she sat down for dinner? Having gotten herself some relief at the thought of him? Her stiffening at his words made him smirk,  _ “So many stories. _ But these pretty lips.”

One finger swiped her lower lip downward, as if plushing it with a bit of pressure. She kept herself still in order for him to do so.

“What have they done?”

“I haven’t...I’ve never…”

She shouldn’t tell him. He’d been so cruel. What was there to gain in sharing this?

“Never what?”

“I’ve never kissed anyone.”

“Rey.”

She tried to step away but he hefted her in front of him.

_ “Please—” _

“Don’t tell a man exactly what he wants if he can’t have it,” his hands closed in on her waist, pulling her even closer. “I thought you’d come to me when you were ready, but you never came back.”

“P-people leave,” she kept her hands on his shoulders and tried not to get any closer. Or any farther away.

“I know,” he said quietly. “You left me.”

“No one wanted me back.”

His brow pushed against hers, a bullish gesture, where she accepted and cradled all of his against her skull.

“I wanted you.”

“Ben,” she couldn’t breathe, “no one asked for me. I waited.”

He lifted his brow from hers. His brown eyes were soft and confused, and a little angry.

“What do you mean?”

She had to know what had been decided had been best for all of them. He had to have known after Rey was phoned at school that she wouldn’t be coming, probably before she was phoned.

“From school—” she blinked up at him “—and the funeral. They told me I couldn’t go.”

If his hands were too tight before they were strangling around her waist now. She shivered as he hefted her closer.

“What?” he was searching her face as if she could, only physically, give him the explanation, “who is  _ they? _ What do you mean?”

Rey hiccuped. There was an odd sensation, like she was becoming lighter, when this sin he dragged out began to become more and more distant from herself. This had hurt him? Then he had never imagined her agony. 

“Holdo, the headmistress at school. I wasn’t to leave. Someone had called to tell her Han had died, maybe Leia had, I’m not sure, and I was sent back to classes straight away. I wanted to come home.”

Ben stepped back from her as if she had slapped him. She searched back over her words for something she had done to hurt him that badly, but she didn’t know what she had said.

He took a deep, wild, animalistic breath and brought a hand over his eyes.

“I’m trying to remember,” he admitted, as if that would be strange to someone like her, whose every moment was dedicated to that. “Leia was too distraught. Luke handled all the arrangements for Han...”

* * *

Ben gave a shout after her as she tore out of the kitchen door, but he’d taken off his boots when he came inside, and she just ran off. 

It didn’t matter. When someone needed to get where they were going as badly as she did, shoes didn’t mean anything.

It was unclear how far she had to get until she lost him, but Leia was right. All they had to do was leave a door open and one day she’d bolt so fast they’d never be able to stop her.

Rey ran blindly through the rain. Something felt right about being back on the moors. Freeing. Even through this fit of rage, it made more sense for her than anything in the last decade had.

Now she was home. Truly home. Returned a completely different person. A false Skywalker.

She’d taken his name after he’d taken  _ everything _ from her. 

She hit the mud in front of his dilapidated cottage and almost slid into one of the stone walls. It was not conducive to her goals to break her own neck, but it hardly slowed her down when the heart-stopping slide delivered her into the side of the house.

Her hands slammed on the soft wood of the door as hard as they could. It wasn’t a knock, it was a demand. 

She’d tear this building apart rock by rock if she had to. 

The door opened and an old gray face seemed to already know exactly who was there. And seemed expectant of this level of anger; which to her was obscene, impossible, incapable of being born.

_ “You kept me away.” _

Some people would have rushed out the excuse they gave for such harm done. Luke took a deep breath before speaking. It was the kind of tone taken not because something could break but because it was already shattered.

“He was an angry boy and you two were going to hurt each other.”

“We were each other’s closest friends. He had just lost his father!”

“You didn’t see him after you left. I’d catch him up at that Abbey so drunk and stupid and angry I thought he’d claw your skin off your bones if you stepped foot in that house.”

“He needed someone to care for him.”

“We were all doing our best. We didn’t know what would happen if you came home from school and then went back to finish your studies. That was Leia’s priority for you. Ben might’ve burned the house down if we sent you back to London after coming in for the funeral.”

“Maybe I wanted to be  _ home.” _

Her breath was coming too fast: too fast to talk, to cry, or to listen. All these years of pain between them. 

She had always made allowances for Luke, despite Ben’s discomfort around him. Luke knew all the old legends. He was a part of them in blood almost more than Leia was, or even Ben, by name. He was bristly and sometimes mean, but she tolerated it for the stories. 

“We did what was best for you both. Look at everything you have. And Ben, he’d straightened himself out and eventually he moved on and found someone who was good for him. It was better this way.”

Numbness soaked into her brain. Those holidays she’d wanted to come home. The years he’d waited for her until he couldn’t anymore. How many did it take until he stopped?

It was fine to move on when they were the ones steering their own paths.  _ This _ was why they both seemed so needlessly hurt. They’d been torn apart. Neither of them chose this. 

_ “You took us from each other.” _

“And look what he did without you here. He cleaned up his act. He married a good woman. He turned that entire farm around and prospered.”

Ben was always hers. Even if she wasn’t his. Maybe Rey and Ben would have kissed each other up at the Abbey if she had stayed longer and finally been ready. And maybe it wouldn’t have worked out. Things would be awkward for a while. It didn’t matter.

The love they had wouldn’t have been broken by a kiss that might have been regretful. It wouldn’t be broken by him marrying someone else. He was her best friend and the only one who understood her. And she understood him.

It wasn’t that she knew he’d have chosen her in the end. Just that Ben being unable to know he wasn’t alone when he made these choices  _ broke her.  _

“You let him hate me. You even know that  _ stupid _ name would hurt him and you let me use it.”

“You wanted to name yourself after me?” Luke shook his head at her. “You took that life for yourself. Do you really think I’m going to stop a scavenger from taking the trash it picks up? This is what happens. And just writing that a word has a different meaning in a book doesn’t suddenly make it true.”

Rey had to leave this place at once. Or she’d do something she’d regret. 

But there was one last thing. 

Her breath came hotly in and out of her nose. It was flared like Ben’s did when he was angry. Was there a part of her that wasn't taken from all of them?

“I will be the last Skywalker. Not you. And I intend to do so much more with that legacy than you’ve ever done.”

The old man merely grunted at her. She’d always hoped he’d have something to say to lock her existence into a place that made sense. Why she went to live with the Solos. Why she was entranced by their stories. Why she was sent away. 

The only answer she received was an ugly one about why she never came back when it mattered most. Why it ended up breaking her heart. 

He was not  _ her  _ family. Luke was, however, the last family Ben had left. Only that made her leave the house without causing him harm.

  
  


* * *

Ben found her up at the Abbey. 

By the time he reached her, they were both soaked through with rain. And thunder was coming.

His whole body was held like he just wanted to capture her in a blanket like a bird that had gotten caught indoors, to be carried, squawking, to be set loose where it belonged. 

She couldn’t begin to name where that was.

The stones around them looked more skeletal than they had when she’d last seen them. The Abbey seemed to be so solid and imposing when she was a child. Now, it was a brittle set of ruins to be excavated. 

“Rey,” he came up close from where she was hunched over the stone altar, trying to shove the rock aside and see what was amongst the great fracture underneath. “We need to get home.”

Her foot slid in the mud as she tried to shove the broken stone slat up. It was probably heavier than Ben. She’d been at this for a while: her hands were scraped and raw from trying to remove the stone. 

“Please. It’s easily the work of ten men, let it go.”

It was obvious unless the person thinking about it was a child. How many hours had she and Ben been poking through bloody  _ grass _ like they’d just kind the sword in a bog?

She’d left Luke’s cottage in a complete mess. All she could think about was the Abbey, and Catherine’s notes. The archeologist. The one who everyone in his family thought was better suited for Ben. 

She was the spinster author by their designation. The nobody.

She scrabbled against the muddy earth and she shoved fruitlessly against the stones. 

“It’s in the Abbey. I know where it is. I have to move it.”

_ “Rey!” _

Ben hauled her roughly back by the elbows as one of the stone arches above their heads crumbled, as it probably began to a few hundred years ago. He yanked so hard and she came with him so fast they both tumbled back to the ground as the rocks fell onto the altar. 

It was a struggle to catch her breath. 

They could have been crushed. How long had that old ceiling been this close to falling? Had all the storms washed it away, or just time?

He was sprawled on his back beside her, seeming equally winded.

“That’s probably why Leia didn’t want us playing up here.”

He touched his hands gently along her back: his voice as stunned as she felt.

It was impossible to look at him after what happened at Luke’s cottage. And now she’d nearly killed them both. 

Her head rested against the mud underneath her. She didn’t  _ want _ to look at him. Just mistake after mistake after mistake. 

Ben took a deep breath beside her. 

_ “I don’t believe it.” _

At his tone of pure shock, Rey lifted her head from the earth to peer over her shoulder at the damage. 

The altar had split under the falling stone and a silver blade poked out. 

She crawled forward a few paces. 

_ “Careful,” _ he said, but came with her. His arm slung around her shoulders as he glanced up at where the eave of the stone arch had collapsed: it looked like all that could fall had already fallen but his hand still came up over the crown of her head as if to shield it. 

It wouldn’t do much to stop a rock from falling on her head, but it was still chivalrous of him to try. The closer she got, the more impossible it seemed. 

They each took a hand and grabbed the hilt together. His covered hers, dwarfed hers, warmed hers, as they both clutched the sword together.

She took a deep breath.

“On three—” she prompted in a reverent whisper.

_ “Three,” _ he said, and before she could count he immediately began tugging, scooting them both backwards on the ground as the blade came with them, “and let’s get out of the way quickly before any more rocks fall on us.”

She and the sword went with him.

Once when they were safely out of reach of what was left of the ceiling arch. She let out a breath and they both softened their hands on the hilt. Neither let go immediately, as something finally found was hard to release.

Together they tilted the sword to the gray sky. One could hardly notice the rain when something like this had happened.

Her breath came quick and wonderful.

“It is real,” he whispered in awe, the blade shining like moonlight. Had he not believed it? It was the one thing she never doubted.

Nothing else felt real anymore. 

Ben cleared his throat beside her. His hands had formed the outer layer over the hilt, safekeeping hers, and then he took them away. 

“You did it,” he bit his lip and considered her, in her moment, that was once theirs. His tone congratulated her, but it wasn’t celebratory. “It’s yours.”

Rey finally took her eyes off the sword and looked at him. 

“No. It’s for us to share.”

“You didn’t need my help. Take it.”

_ “Catherine _ found it.”

Tears slid down her cheeks. She’d almost wanted to turn that into a secret she’d keep forever. Catherine figured out, probably within a moment of bored thoughts, what Rey had been desperately trying to do her entire life. 

“I’m not a real Skywalker,” she shook her head, “and she came closer to the real thing than I ever could. You were always meant to have it.”

“Enough of that,” he stood up and took her arm, trying to help her up. “Come on. We need to go inside. It’s only going to get worse out here.”

With a grunt, she sheathed the sword at a depth halfway down the blade in the soft mud. She didn’t get up. 

“Rey, come with me. It isn’t safe up here.”

She closed her eyes and let the winds surround her. They found the sword. It was over. 

That distant thunder in naked air was like a plane roaring overhead. It racked through her body and she flinched from every limb to every finger and toe. Ben was carefully guiding her to her feet but she didn’t want to go, and held herself like some lifeless thing. 

Even as she stood, he couldn’t move her. 

“I can’t stay here.”

Ben’s anger coiled around them like a serpent. Warmth and strength that only got tighter and tighter until it bound them together.

_ “Haven’t I lost enough?” _ he shouted at her. 

There was a flash in the distance, over his shoulder, but after it was gone in an instant she looked back at the black expression on his face. 

This was what he wanted. 

Her hands twisted up into shaking fists. Then she lifted them, and let them go, and brought them to his cheeks. 

She kissed him. 

Oh, it was stupid. 

It was stupid to sink to their knees together while their mouths tossed against each other like two waves meeting out at sea. Crashing together. Coming together under blessed rain.

So foolish. 

He laid her down in the earth and kissed her harder. His hands weaving into her hair. He held her like she was something he couldn’t drop. He kissed her like he had been denied all his life. Like _he_ had been waiting, not her. Greedy and so appreciative. She squirmed and whimpered as he remained steady and just kissed her because he finally could. 

All the little things one would learn, in school or in the company of other women, where to spritz perfume and how to laugh or what to order off a menu to be wanted by a man this way, all of those methods had been left behind in London and never used. Her skin and clothes and hair were coated with mud. He was rain-soaked and not very charming at the moment. 

God, she wanted him more than air. The wind whipped at their bodies so he swayed atop her, lumbering in his massive weight and his attempts to keep from crushing her, something so terrible that she hoped she'd be taken brutally by him to see the beauty in his strength. 

He never knew why she couldn’t come home and he never knew why they had to be alone for years and she should tell him, but it was so horrible, and he had done something so noble and brave and  _ brilliant _ with his love even if it didn’t go to Rey. He had tried and succeeded to love anyway. Rey was too much of a coward. 

So Ben had done the right thing, and she the wrong one, why would she ever punish him for a moment longer for that?

That love that wasn’t hers was a beautiful thing about him and even if she couldn’t have it, for all those years, it did not need to be cheapened by what Luke did to them. If Ben knew, he’d feel that  _ Rey _ had lost something, and she knew he would let it darken years of his life that should have been good.  _ Were _ good. Deserved to be good.

Just like she and Ben had still taken the pain they felt towards each other and chose to be cruel about it. Was it all Luke? Or was that all it took for things between them to be awful?

Instead of trying to figure this out she just kissed him.

Feeling him moan as a vibration in her body unlaced every thread she had wrapped around herself. She had sworn off of men and what they wanted from her because that was reasonable advice: but this felt more like a man taking what  _ she _ wanted, and him rumbling with pleasure to do so against her. 

Her hands came up and took tight fistfuls of his wet hair.

His sweater came up her torso to bare her breasts for access to his mouth. Her nipples were hard, her skin cold and wet and clammy, but his mouth was so hot and  _ kind _ to her. 

“You’re ready?”

His eyes flashed over hers, his mouth lifted from her skin, and just the gentle touch of his thumb to her temple was almost undoing her. Rain shocked against her bare chest where he had abandoned her skin to ask her this. 

It took her a moment to understand the question.

“Yes,” she cried out, wiggling in the earth underneath him.

“Now?” he pressed insistently, needing to know, “you’re ready?”

She hadn't been, once, so he needed to _know._

With a howl she pulled her skirt up around her hips. She was so tired of waiting.

_ “Ben,” _ she groaned.  _ “Please.” _

He kissed her again and made her naked for him.. The ritual of diving back to a kiss, of never being able to stop now that he started, made him seem like a madman above her. But she didn’t want to think about what made him like this was  _ her. _

Would this be how it would have been, her future, _theirs_ , if she had stayed?

She could feel him wanting her in his chest. Coming over them both like a madness. Would it have felt like this if he always could have had her? And her him?

“Be with me,” he pleaded into the curve of her shoulder. “Rey, be with me.”

Her eyes closed and her head fell back as she focused on the rock of their pressed-together bodies.

They were both possessed by whatever this was. They were both back on the moors together. Perhaps it had to all happen like this. 

As he mouth at her jaw, she pulled him up by the hair in her fists. He hovered about her, lips open, as she took a breath of the cold, bracing air. 

“I will always be with you,” she promised him. Which was different, they both seemed to know, then saying she would never leave him as he had promised her in the kitchen.

She held her breath when they approached the tense moment where it felt like all could be made right in the world again.

Ben’s body writhed like a serpent above her: pressing his lips to her, his hands spanning the curves of her hips, his thighs working hers apart. Hers opened in kind for him like their bodies already knew each other. He had every excuse to know what she was doing, but Rey didn’t have one. 

She just knew. 

She couldn’t breathe when the head of his cock brushed against the swollen nerves of her sex. Like she was swept up into the ocean and her body released her last clutch of air as the waves closed over her head. They were together again and for the first time. Home.

As he entered her body, she felt him return to where he belonged, born back into the earth through her flesh.

* * *

_ So why did she leave. _

The question wasn’t capable of being answered as the train raced through the countryside, with her on it. Rey had not done as much as wash the mud from her hair. Her clothes were still soaked with rain. People around the car were starting to whisper about her.

She had not expected to be leaving this place looking worse than when she came. But she’d managed to make things worse than when Ben hated her.

Maybe it was that the train carried her with such a strength it felt like she was collected in a solid, powerful force, and she would be changed by the time she reached London. Maybe it was to have the thing she wanted just once and leave before sadness, death, or a war could take it away. 

Or it was because if Ben had looked at her for a moment longer, she would have told him what Luke had done to them both. Eliminating their choice. Creating years where all they wanted to do was hurt each other, to pass the pain back and forth because it was too blazing hot to hold inside of oneself. 

And maybe Luke was right. She was a filthy scavenger. 

The sword was Ben’s. She left it behind at the house. She hadn’t even fetched her purse from the attic. Or her notebook. 

The only thing that she did take with her was his sweater, which she was still wearing, and she might always wear the clothes that were on her body when she gave herself to him. 

The muscles where Ben had sheathed himself would clench every few moments, her hands fisting in her lap, so it had to be true that it had happened. She left him sleeping in a world she finally realized she'd never belong in. And her quest was finished. The Skywalker sword was returned to its rightful owner. 

She’d made a call at the hotel for someone to collect her at Paddington. She wasn’t sure she’d find her way home from there if she hadn’t. 

She had shown up at the hotel that evening in muddy, ruined clothes and tears all over her bright-red face and made Kaydel promise not to tell anyone anything until she was gone. Kaydel had questions,  _ a lot of them _ , and even if she didn’t get answers, she bought Rey a train ticket home for which Rey was going to pay her back, and probably send some flowers or chocolate or her firstborn in thanks.

Because Kaydel was kind, just like her sister.

Poe was waiting for her there when she arrived at the station in his fashionable clothes. He was always a very handsome man, a very well-dressed and well presented man. When she was protecting herself from his attention, it did not slip her notice that a man like him  _ made sense. _

She dragged her feet in her muddy shoes and her borrowed skirt and Ben’s sweater tucked around herself. Her editor did not recognize her, the missing author the publisher had run newspaper ads for, the woman he was looking for, until she was standing right in front of him.

Then he wrinkled his nose.

“Christ,” Poe spared no disdain in the observation, “You look like a farmer’s wife.” 

Rey burst into tears. 

* * *

“Be with me always - take any form - drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I can not live without my life! I can not live without my soul!”

Emily Brontë, _Wuthering Heights_


	11. Chapter 11

_Just for a minute_

_The silver forked sky_

_Lit you up like a star_

_That I will follow_

* * *

_“What_ were you thinking?”

Rey tucked her face behind the back of a kitchen chair as Leia applied the iodine to Ben’s scrape. Her own knee was bruised and aching, but it wasn’t as bad as the torn-up flesh of his arm he had sustained from his fall. She flinched in sympathy when Ben hissed through his teeth at the application of a tonic that was both cool and burning. That had to sting badly. Leia wasn’t exactly tender as she dabbed cotton up and down the open wound. 

Leia wasn’t particularly soft about foolishness.

“We were playing,” Rey replied lamely, her face flaming red knowing just how weak her excuse was. 

Ben said nothing, taking his implied punishment from the touch of stinging cotton in silence.

“They’re just being kids,” Han replied from the door of the kitchen, but his arms were crossed and his posture was not as loose as it usually was. He seemed wary of the situation: or perhaps the damage done to both children in their anger towards each other.

“Han,” Leia’s voice was tight. “Some discipline. Please.”

He straightened and his intense stare went from Leia to his son: wound up in energy before knowing how to place it. Ben stared back with a black look.

“Don’t go up to those ruins anymore.”

Rey sat up in horror. She’d been denied sweets. She’d been denied staying in the city where she grew up. She had been denied so many things that seemed trivial now in the war. But this was too much to give up. It was like being denied air to breathe.

“Luke says it’s fine!”

“Luke is not your father,” Leia rarely turned her frustrations to Rey: but she went pale and straight as a rod when she saw Rey’s face in response. “You are not allowed up at the Abbey under any circumstances, understood?”

Despite their scuffle up on the stones, both children harbored a resentment about being caught that was much deeper than any residual anger at each other. Ben especially, for being more hurt, seemed angriest at the people tending his wounds and trying to prevent them.

“Or _what?”_

“Ben!” 

Han was a lazy, pleasant sort, the most jarring of the Solo family’s presence in Yorkshire. Leia could fit in anywhere and kept so busy it was clear she had a purpose here, maybe beyond the needs of the farm with how busy her office always was. But Han was a constant: watching him calmly read the newspaper every afternoon, Rey could sometimes fully forget there was a war going on.

Some intensity switched on for the quiet Yank, a fire behind the eyes that suddenly reminded her of his son’s quick temper. They shared so few obvious qualities. This one was so familiar it even frightened Ben. 

Leia let the shout sit, a length of tension unthreaded for her own use, as she gentled her hands on her son to clean the wound. 

“I just don’t know what got into you two.”

A typical quarrel: where they were too rough on each other as usual, just rough enough for it to feel like they were fighting for something. Rey had fallen on the rock and with her went Ben.

They each bore their own wounds for it.

“We weren’t thinking,” Ben answered for them both, sullenly, “we were fighting.”

* * *

“What were you _thinking?”_

Rey resisted that cowed, miserable flinch into her seat, like she had in her chair in Holdo’s office. She’d grown used to arguing with Poe. Never once, however, had he brandished a drink in his hand to argue with her quite so early in the afternoon. 

She kept herself silent as Poe stared at her from his chair and set down his drink. Fingers steepled in front of his mouth in a way that was much too paternal for her taste.

“Explain to me what happened. I’m sure it’s fascinating.”

Her spine wasn’t straight in her seat like it always was. She slouched back lazily. Even if she had washed the Yorkshire grit from her skin, there was still a roughness to her person that could not be sanded away. Poe was looking at her like he didn’t quite recognize her.

No, he was looking at her like he noticed her, something he didn’t have to pay close attention to in the past, and the realization was exhausting. 

Obviously she hadn’t been thinking: she hadn’t been thinking enough at all since she’d heard Ben was alone in the world and she _thought_ she had to go to him.

“I was stuck on inspiration for the new book so I went back for a day or two and lost track of time.”

“Don’t say this like you’re one of my bestsellers who I can just lose for a day or two of roaring parties, no word given, no harm done. It’s not _you._ And then you came back covered head to toe in mud.”

“I was collecting soil samples of the region,” she replied neatly, “for research.”

Poe pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and pointer finger. While his hand was there, he sighed. Deeply.

“Capital. I suppose that this is now all out of your system?”

She took a deep breath and leaned further back in the chair. The front legs lifted off the floor. In school she’d be scolded for using a chair like this. Since school she had always sat like she would be.

Now she hung back in the air. Mulling over her answer. Polishing it like a stone.

 _“I suppose so,”_ she agreed, letting the legs of the chair drop back down to the rug, her tone airy.

Poe dropped his hand and looked across from her at his desk with a very vexed expression. The glass in his other hand tilted and the ice dinged against the crystal, sweating with condensation. Being around him was different now that she wasn’t a virgin. Being herself was different. Men were less mysterious. Poe possessed less of that mystique that had gathered around him as the most present man in her life for all these years. She hadn’t realized she had been quite so wary of him all this time. That she had once wrongly believed the sense-making of a man and a woman together was just a switch that could be flipped, and one day if she wasn’t careful Poe would end up her husband or her ruin just as any man could. 

That was one man: only one man.

She did not need to dress like an old maid and keep herself frigid and proper and joyless. She merely needed to _want_ for her life to be compromised: which would never happen between her and Poe. 

She’d only wanted one person this whole time. Funny how she couldn’t have him now. The mud had been washed away but it felt like something dirty clung to the spirit of her. Something old and permanent demolished, reduced to ash, coating the inside of her lungs and leaving a cough in her that gripped her speech.

She blinked at Poe, waiting for him to scold her. Daring him to. The wrath of someone acting like a child for not getting the attention they wanted and then not wanting to be patronized when they behaved like a child. 

He just shook his head at her and took a drink. 

She took a deep breath. 

“Do you want those pages or not?”

He lifted his glass to his lips. Something in his face seemed frightened, like he realized she finally knew her own destructive power. Rey had been timidly building a house of cards around herself to shelter her for her entire life. It had done nothing to protect her. No matter the effort she just wanted to smack it with her hand to all come tumbling down.

“I suppose I have no choice.”

* * *

_“Please tell us that you’ll come.”_

When she heard it over the telephone, she pictured Leia’s bright, proud eyes. Her only son, engaged to be married. Excitement plain on her face. Pleading with Rey to be happy for him as well. 

Inviting her home for once, after all the times she didn’t.

But it was not Leia inviting her to the wedding. It was Rose.

It was another day, another row with Poe lately, so she almost hadn’t come to the phone. They were fighting about the ending of her series on an almost line-by-line basis. About the nature of forgiveness.

 _“It isn’t that easy to be forgiven, to just want to be,”_ he’d snarl over his glass of whiskey. _“If it’s just measured by good intentions, at any rate it’ll never be earned.”_

And her brain would pulse in her skull like the first throb of a bruise when the numbness of shock ebbs away.

Writing was not her only joy anymore. It was just an accessory to her sorrow.

However, Rey softened at the sound of Rose’s voice. Familiar. A secondary sense of The Dales that wasn’t as painful as a memory of Leia or Han. Or Luke. Or Ben.

Her frustration with her editor was certainly making her foundation crumble. Would this be the rest of her life? Just Rey: on her books and her editor to be survived by if a plane flew over London and blew it to pieces?

She closes her eyes and sees it: the shiny surface of a photograph, the reception of a wedding, where she flits at the edges like a moth. It’s little. But she’s anxious about how close she is to not being remembered at all. 

Being wanted at such an event, openly, without having to feel obligation in the invitation extended, was a drug. She felt the emptiness in her chest that this was, in fact, what she wanted. Yet she felt less welcome than ever.

“I—”

She couldn’t explain why she shouldn’t. She was sure there was an excuse she could use, without hurting herself, without it having to be a lie, and she still didn’t summon one. 

“We miss you. Everyone misses you. I knew it was fate that I saw you when I was set to pick out my dress. The invitations will go out later in the week, but I wanted to tell you personally. You _must_ come.”

Maybe it was because it was nice to hear that. She had gotten too comfortable with the Solos, _practically family_ in the worst way that had only hurt everyone close to her _,_ that it went unsaid even by the people who wanted her there the most. Assumed she would act upon it. Rey knew what she was getting from this invitation. Her anger bloomed in her chest for a moment: that old bitterness. 

Rey was very, very tired of feeling unwelcome. So she decided to not bother. Taking the name Skywalker had brought her so much success, her own choices taught her this success was all she’d ever have. She’d go to the wedding even if it was foolish. And she’d stop pretending she shouldn’t be there if Rose asked her to come.

_Someone wants me there. They told me so. So I shall go._

“—I would like to very much.”

She heard Rose’s thrilled laugh trilling on the other side of the line.

There was no reason why she shouldn’t. 

Other than having to eventually face what she had done.

* * *

Things were harder to pull into focus. Sometimes people spoke to her and it was suddenly that she remembered them, or what was happening, or where she was. 

Her days were spent writing and arguing with Poe. She existed in her book. 

She had power there. What happened made sense. And it would lead to an inevitable conclusion that was best for everyone. Even if Poe doubted her.

So he caught her off guard when he called late one night, just weeks away from Rose’s wedding. 

Rey had been asleep in a stack of papers on her bed. It was strange how the planes had haunted her in Yorkshire, where in London she slept like the dead, like the city was already a stone tomb. 

She slept in the Dales like she was a heart beating from an open chest. Raw and bleeding. Alive and deliciously vulnerable.

The sound of the telephone woke her. Sometimes Poe had grand ideas late at night about what he needed her to “fix” in her writing. He was the kind of reader who thought all manner of delivery for this criticism was appropriate and necessary for her own good. 

She did not agree about that.

She took the sweater curled in her arms and pulled it over her head, she went to the telephone unusually aware of her surroundings to soundly tell Poe off. It was very late, she had been asleep, she felt overwhelmed, he shouldn’t bother her. All of these feelings she was conscious of, at the ready to list them before she hung up on him and pulled the cord out of the wall. 

But a voice filled her ear like a warm breath when she answered. Even if she was in a rare place where she knew these things about herself and her surroundings; they did not protect her. 

They made the moment real, capable of being a memory. 

She was avoiding making any more of those lately.

In the weeks since she left Yorkshire she had become very comfortable with only remaining in this world, after she died, in her stories. 

“Do you know what you need to apologize for?”

Her blood went cold. Rey drew the sweater tighter around her body, even if he couldn’t see her shiver wherever he was. 

Rose’s Wedding. She’d sent her acceptance this week. His Wedding. Leaving. 

“I do,” she replied quietly, but he ignored her.

“I haven’t been able to stop thinking about,” he began, with a tone of wrath that made her whole body tense up, _“your tits.”_

She couldn’t breathe. He said it as if she truly haunted him, harmed him, but her entire body was singing at the wounded tenderness in his voice. 

She kept silent, licking her lips, unable as an author to form words for a moment.

“You should apologize for that,” he added firmly, clearing his throat.

And he waited. 

She lingered at the edge of her reply like a dancer not quite hearing where to come into the song. There were a few pulses between them both and she missed each chance, stammering.

“I’m—sorry.”

If the tone of her apology was weak it was because she knew what she owed him and this was mere pennies back towards that debt. 

He did not hesitate as she had.

“Say it properly.”

“...Ben?”

“Say _‘I’m sorry you can’t stop thinking about my tits.’_ The whole thing.”

Rey swallowed, the phone clenched tightly in her hand. She blinked around her empty flat, the lights still on because that was exactly how she fell asleep. Her free hand was black with ink, and toying with the neck of her sweater.

“Well I don’t see who this is helping.”

His voice rumbled on the other end of the line.

“I’m a little drunk, so it seems like a good idea to me.”

She ducked her chin to her chest.

“I suppose it would,” a breath left her lips, stuttering, knowing she should hang up before they did more damage. But once he was there, she couldn’t. It was always that way. Even when it was awful. Her teeth clenched together as she spoke: “Ben, I’m so sorry—that you can’t stop thinking about my tits.”

His reply was like a wolf snapping its jaws: so quick and ready.

“Are you sorry they’re so pretty in my mouth that I can’t _stand_ it?”

Her lips pinched together. 

“If you want me to be sorry.”

Her tone contained a petulance that his tone did not: but his actions were more petulant than hers. 

“Say it,” he insisted.

She huffed out a sigh. He was infuriating. She shouldn’t be entertaining this, especially in how it cheapened what she owed him, just how massive all that was.

It was offensive, in a small way, that this is the apology he demanded. Not the big one. He didn’t call her in the middle of the night to talk about the big things. 

Just this.

“I’m sorry you think they’re so pretty—”

“—pretty and _soft.”_

“I’m sorry my tits are so _pretty and soft_ that you can’t stand it. In—your—mouth,” she added as an afterthought, over-punctuated with her tongue between her teeth.

There was a low grunt on the other side of the phone like a wounded animal.

This conversation was vile and obscene and she wanted more than anything to have it with Ben uninterrupted. He didn’t even know her breasts currently sat under the sweater she took from him.

Rey pulled out the wooden chair beside the phone and settled into it, her nightgown underneath fluttering around her bare legs. Her thighs felt heavy in the seat, nervy, wide awake.

She gripped the blanket around her shoulders. She craved a sandwich. The sound of Han’s voice. Ben’s midnight eyes and the smell of pickles. 

He was silent for a moment. Waiting.

Rey cleared her throat and her own, unprompted apology began to spill out.

“I’m sorry,” she blinked at the wall, madness overtaking her because she felt _good_ at the core of this pain and he had coaxed something devilish out of her, as he always did, “I’m sorry it felt so nice. I’m sorry your mouth is the perfect place for them. I’m sorry that I took that away from you.”

“Let’s not be hasty.”

He was breathing heavily wherever he was. 

She couldn’t say it. The next one:

_I’m sorry that I’ll be back._

As much as it hurt, she wanted this in some strange way. For him to linger, even severed apart. 

_Haunt me, haunt me, haunt me Ben._

It felt like no one else in the world was awake. Ben felt unsteady, with so little he had said to her. None of it important. 

“You’re drunk?”

He sighed. If she felt tired, he sounded it twice as much. An ache settled in her brow. A phantom pain. 

That had happened in the Dales had been too painful to think about. She wasn’t being realistic that she could attend Rose’s wedding and not have to face this. Maybe she had assumed when she did, Ben would know what to do. 

From the vulnerability in his answer, it was clear that he didn’t.

“A little. Enough for an excuse just to call.”

Rey closed her eyes. It made sense. Something to dull the pain.

“Then just tell me what you need me to be sorry for tonight. And then go to sleep.”

The call became a practice in Ben’s breathing. They both listened to it for several moments, shaking and pained, with an exchange of concern in performance and observation of a doctor and patient. Just breath. Just his. 

A gusting sigh ended this thread of tension between them. He was able to breathe again all at once. 

“There’s a lot I want you to be sorry for tonight that you don’t have to be.”

_Tell me what to do. I’ll do it. I’ll do anything if I just know how._

“I’m sorry for my tits,” she said sadly, lost to the absurdity of this conversation, “I’m sorry you have to think about them. I’m so, so sorry.”

She pressed her face into the wool sleeve.

All the air left the room when instead of answering, he just hung up.

* * *

“Rey? I wanted to telephone to thank you for the lovely flowers.”

Rey tucked a stray curl behind her ear. She folded the pages of her speech into her purse and clasped it shut. they didn’t have the time to be taking calls now but for Kaydel she’d put herself and everything else on hold. 

She slumped against the wall to settle in for the conversation, Poe clucking at her at the door of her flat, her chaperone, her keeper, both of them resenting it. 

She was speaking at a benefit for a children’s hospital that evening so perhaps in this case his annoyance that she stopped them on their way out the door just to chat on the phone wasn’t unfounded. 

She still ignored him.

“I had hoped you’d like them,” Rey responded, not sure who she was supposed to be as she spoke. The person who wanted to be friends with Kaydel or the person who knew that Kaydel’s loyalty was to Ben first. Guarded. Unguarded. Reaching. Running away. “I wanted to thank you for your help.”

“I was so worried! Were you hurt? Ben has a ghastly temper, but I would never think he’d harm a soul, and never a hair on your head. Not you.”

“He didn’t hurt me,” Rey said, her lips pursing in concern. Had anyone assumed that? How awful. Guilt bloomed, petals of it flowering expansively all at once, that she had left him with such a mess.

Ben didn’t deserve that just because her head wasn’t on straight.

It was the same reason he didn’t deserve her.

Poe was watching her more closely than he ever had before. As a writer, he only cared about her sales. As a woman, she hadn’t caught his interest. But this conversation seemed to have him riveted. His dark eyes settled on her from under his hooded lids. 

He was figuring her out.

Rey straightened and focused on masking herself from him.

Kaydel’s breath was quick on the other side of the phone.

“I didn’t think so. You were just so upset. I didn’t know what to think, really. Are you alright?”

“I’m quite alright.”

Kaydel was silent for a moment.

“You just _left?”_

Rey’s shoulders drew up almost to her ears, like she was flinching away from a punch. She couldn’t explain this in front of Poe.

“I...it’s complicated.”

“Ben was inconsolable. I haven’t seen him so distraught since—you said you’re fine?”

Ben’s sister-in-law sounded a little hurt. 

Ben had told her that Kaydel had wanted to be her friend. 

“Yes,” Rey whispered quietly. “I’m very sorry.”

“I’m just trying to understand—”

“I’m very sorry to have troubled you,” Rey said softly, her throat closing up, “I have to go.”

Hanging up was less a relief with Poe already waiting to pounce once the phone was in the cradle. 

“I thought you owed me a few apologies for vanishing,” he absently wound one of his curls around his finger, teasing it to fall dangerously over one eye. Rey might have once thought he was doing this to entice her, but the gesture was done in front of her because he didn’t mind that the air of mystery of his looks was shattered for her. “But it looks like you’ve racked up that debt far worse elsewhere.”

She pulled her shawl tighter around her shoulders. 

“We’re late. We should go.”

He didn’t move from his spot by the phone.

“What happened when you vanished?”

Would she always be answering that question? Would there always be this half of her never to be joined to another, a separate world she couldn’t touch and owed every explanation for her absence?

She alway swallowed down any answer she could have given anyone.

To suppress her shaking hands, Rey drew her coat tighter around herself. Like she was the one ready to go, and Poe was stalling. She cleared her throat as if to remind him.

“We’re going to be late.” Poe caught her arm when she tried to move to the door. _“Don’t touch me.”_

It came out of her like a bark. Poe let it hang in the air for a moment, like the moment of death that fills the room when a mouse trap snaps shut. Rey just as caught with his hand above her elbow.

“It’s not like that and I think you know that it isn’t,” he said first, in a very dry tone, and didn’t let her go. Rey growled, feral, a hand on her when she’d never wanted a hand on her ever again. “I don’t know what you left unfinished up in God-knows-where, but it was unfinished enough for you to shirk your entire writing schedule just to go and muck it up all over again.”

Rey pried his fingers off her arm but didn’t go to the door. She slumped against the wall, deflated, as he shook of his hand out as if he’d gotten mud on it. Her eyes were on his hand, distrusting, until she realized why he seemed just as unenthused as she was.

It really wasn’t like that. Her eyes widened at the realization. 

_“Oh,”_ she said at once, yet very slowly, drawing it out as it filled the silence of her flat. All but the closest lights overhead had been shut off for them to leave. They should be leaving. He was there to make sure she’d go, or she’d just end up curled up on top of her comforter with her clothes on once again. “Oh.”

“Why did you go?”

He didn’t look at her, merely stared at the floor. There was a hardness to his gaze, a harshness. His jaw was tight. He’d given her more than he would like with that information. She could tell it was starting to bruise him up inside. 

“I went to try and...find a better ending.”

“I’d assumed you would just make one up,” he seemed to half-laugh when he saw her stunned expression, wondering how he could have guessed, “You can’t have a real ending like your stories as the person writing them. Rey of the Dales doesn’t write a book about Ben: I’m sure that’s how they can actually forgive each other.”

It was like Ben was across the hall, in the dark, looking in at this moment. How she wished he could see her. How she hoped he never would. This pain was too massive to be shared and it was all her fault. 

_Forgive me_ she wanted to beg, to have him see this real moment, because she didn’t know how to write the truth anymore. Even as only she saw it. 

Poe plucked some lint off the end of his scarf. 

“Maybe you’re not due another visit as an author. But against my professional judgement, I would still recommend one for Rey.”

  
  


* * *

Her return to the Dales was hasty. It was for a wedding. It was structured and planned to have her in and out swiftly. 

Hopefully painlessly.

It was to be the opposite of the last time she returned. 

Instead of agonizing on the train ride up, remembering everything about Ben, prodding a bruise, she pushed him far from her mind. She thought about how nice it would be when her final book was published. Maybe she’d take a trip by herself. That would be nice. 

She could look for a new editor if she ever felt like writing again. 

Poe insisted she get some work done as she was there. So when she came almost empty-handed the last time, this time she hefted a typewriter into her cab from the train station to the hotel. 

Of course the only hotel for miles happened to be where Kaydel worked, but she hoped…

She still hoped they could be friends. And that was how to start. By coming back and apologizing. 

The drive calmed her considerably. At least it nearly took from her that last ten years or so from her thoughts, tucked them away for a while. Arguments. Bitterness. It was just green grass. She could see the hills under a clear sky. She could greet them in waves of memory. It was everything the last visit was not. 

A familiar face at the front desk of the hotel gave Rey her undivided attention as soon as she walked through the door. Kaydel didn’t exactly look thrilled to see Rey walk through the door of the lobby: but there was a vulnerability in that expression that for the first time, made it seem to Rey that the person who could be capable of being hurt was more likely Kaydel. And that made her soften. 

It was time to try something new. To accept invitations. To apologize. 

If she couldn’t do that she’d have nothing.

She set down her bags near the door like she was coming home and went over to hug Kaydel. Because she wanted to be friends, and if she had offended Kaydel in a fraction of the way she hurt Ben, she had to start somewhere. 

Even if Ben was too painful to think about.

Both women relaxed in an instant when Rey’s arms opened. For some people the intention to be friends is enough to face their fear. Kind people, people Rey clearly had avoided for too long.

“Rey!” 

Kaydel’s voice was weepy as she gave her an affectionate squeeze that she was sure she didn’t deserve. This was strange. How all felt forgiven in the hug. There were often so many thoughts that went into an apology, authorship, quite like a book. Editing. Revising. Reframing. Adding context. 

This was not the crisp, neat apology Rey had planned. It was someone else’s labored breathing in her ear and a tight squeeze of reassuring and so much kindness that did not to be spoken. 

It was the feeling, if the smallest possible slice, that Rey had secretly come back for. 

It was hope. And love. It was what she wished for from the Solos since she got on that first train to London.

It wasn’t the same: but it was enough to be possible, somehow.

* * *

Her trip was planned, but that doesn’t mean it was better thought out than her last. She kept her mind on the wedding’s itinerary and didn’t imagine a single moment other than how she knew a wedding to look, surprisingly unimaginative for an author. Because imagining a moment where she existed in the wedding, in her best dress, perhaps while there was music…

Rey had not in fact planned this well enough at all. 

Poe had done her the courtesy of planning the trip around her very strict schedule. There was some kindness in the time allotted, quick and painless if all fell apart, and the mandatory luggage including her typewriter just to kill time if she would fail quickly but expectedly. She had an excuse to go if she had to. To flee. 

She hoped she’d never use it.

Approaching the hour of the wedding, she prepared herself with the culmination of her research. She had purchased fashion magazines for the event. Power-blue was in fashion so she purchased a lovely dress of that color. She hoped she looked lovely, but not as lovely as the bride. She hopes she looked muted so that when no one danced with her, she wouldn’t look like she made a fool of herself.

Kaydel made her promise to walk to the church together. Without family, it was a relief to have someone to sit beside. Poe even offered to be her escort, as they both knew she was in no danger of him now, but it seemed he was more preoccupied with holding her to her strict schedule so she declined.

Rey stumbled finding her way down the stairs, not from Kaydel whisking herself around the lobby with her hat on one counter and her shoes resting beside a chair on the other side of the room. She had actually felt quite comforted by Kaydel’s motion. She had seen so much in her life go still and dead. Kaydel was like a burning sun. 

Rey’s ankle almost gave out near the bottom of the stairs when she took the step that brought one man in a suit into her sight. His shoulders very straight. His hands folded politely. His dark hair trimmed and fashionably styled. 

Waiting patiently for Kaydel to be ready. 

She almost fell to the floor because Ben was so remarkably brave that it broke her heart. And when he turned, not at the clacking sound of her shoes, but the sudden silence of broken footsteps when she had to catch her balance, she knew he was so much braver than she could ever be. 

“You look so handsome,” she said without selfishness. His long hair had been cut. He was clean-shaven. His black suit crisp and elegant. 

He wasn’t hers: but she still said it like it was good for him to be handsome. Perhaps a way of loving him she had never been strong enough to achieve before this moment.

“Doesn’t he?” Kaydel was fumbling to pin her hat to the crown of her head without a mirror. “I couldn’t ask for a better escort to Rose’s wedding.”

There was so much untroubled-ness in her tone that it had to mean at least an ounce of trouble. Kaydel throwing them together, not unkindly, but knowing it would hurt. 

Kaydel somehow wanting them to get along was perhaps the only force left on earth that would have it be so.

Rey kept herself on the stairs. A few feet above him. Distant enough to not burn herself. 

He was looking at her and it was clear neither of them knew what he felt. It became completely clear, she realized with his eyes on her, that it seemed she had not come back for him.

He simply nodded to her as her heart broke again. 

Kaydel clasped her other shoe, her leg bent and hopping up and down to secure it to her ankle, and then took Ben’s arm automatically. Her hand in his elbow. 

“He looks like he deserves the pair of us,” she said cheekily to Rey, “not a soul would judge him for having two ladies in attendance with him looking like that.”

“I can’t dream of taking your escort to this event,” Rey said after a moment of awkwardness, attempting grace and failing because it seemed to push him away, to decline. 

Ben was silent. But after a moment of just looking he held out his hand to her. 

With Kaydel on his arm, he looked like the brotherly chaperone. She didn’t know what the distinction of his hand meant.

But the three of them walked to the church once she took it and didn’t let go. 

  
  


* * *

Rose was a beautiful bride. Even in pain, the reason Rey was here was to see Rose that way, and she couldn’t resent her for the pain for even a moment because of this. Kaydel and Rey held hands and watched the whole of the mass in a fit of tears and it was the most blessed feeling in the world to have a reason to weep like that and be happy.

Ben was silent on the other side of Kaydel.

Between the service and reception, Rey took the time to breathe, because she felt like she had accomplished what she set out to, and didn’t know where to go next. 

It had to be faced.

In the small garden outside where the party was being held, she heard footsteps approaching her on the gravel.

“So you do return to attend weddings now.”

She deserved the scrutinizing question. The hurt in his voice was obvious. She should have chosen to stay or go. Not both. Not change her mind so he felt the pain of each. 

She crossed her arms in front of her, wishing for a shield since she left him the sword.

“I don’t know,” she said quietly, “but I’m trying it out. Being here again. For the important things.”

He blinked at her and nodded, as if he were expecting as much from her, and looked away as he took a drink.

“I don’t know what you want me to do with that,” he admitted after a moment, staring out at the fuzzy spots of light from the lanterns at the party.

She didn’t know either. Did her answer make him feel unimportant? It wasn’t time to make these suggestions. 

“I often thought you wanted me to prove I could finally let you go,” he closed his eyes and breathed for a moment, “was that what this is about? Rey, just tell me.”

Her hands went into fists and her brow furrowed. She hadn’t wanted that. Perhaps the opposite from the very beginning. 

She just wanted to not hurt anymore. And if she looked at him, when would she stop hearing what Luke said? Maybe never, because that had caused such pain in her that she wanted that damnation of her own love carved on her grave.

Her protest came out as a hiccup: “No. That’s not it.”

“Then why did you run?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then why come back?”

Tears spilled down her cheeks. “Because if I didn’t come now, I never could again. I don’t know if I like the person who can’t show her face around here when it’s the only place I’ve ever belonged.”

Ben stared at her in a long silence. He didn’t move. He didn’t even drink.

“But my wedding was different,” he sniffed after a moment of examining her closely. 

She bit down on her lip.

“You know in every way why it was.”

He moved closer, eyes wide, and shook his head. 

_“Don’t.”_

“I should have come then. I didn’t have the strength. Not when you hated me so much.”

He shook his head furiously.

“I didn’t hate you.”

“What would we have said to each other on that day? Maybe I would have gone, and felt welcome, and _sad_ but _happy_ for your happiness. Or maybe I would have ruined the whole thing. What I remember about you Ben, as a child, is I sometimes never know what you’d give me. Kindness or cruelty. I took pleasure in wondering. I longed for your kindness. But that didn’t mean it was always what you chose. _That doesn’t make you evil—_ ” 

She had to step in front of him to stop him from leaving.

“—it made you a child. I was one too. For longer than I care to admit. It is time for me to grow up.”

She reached in front of her and touched his hands. Held them between their bodies, elbows bent and locked in the air, like they were about to step into a dance together. She had first touched him to fully believe he was real. So handsome on this night. So solid and clear in the darkness. 

He was silent and let her speak.

“When I went back to London, after the war, I didn’t recognize it anymore. The whole city felt like it had been buried for a thousand years. Catherine would have done well there. Excavating in the wreckage for something brilliant. I was wrong for that. To me I was looking for something familiar and I’d never find it there.”

His hands overtook the grasp they had on each other, encircling hers, fingers tight on her hot skin.

“And you stayed away from here because we’re just wreckage to you?”

She squeezed back, her face defiant as it looked dead in his eyes. All it took was this for them to not fear looking at each other. She could never go back to pretending they weren’t so connected.

Rey narrowed her eyes at him fearfully.

“No. What if _I_ changed?” 

The malice left his eyes in an instant. He stared at her as she took a shaking breath.

“What if I came home and no one recognized me?”

His hands slid elegantly to hold her elbows as her body bowed forward with the horror in her question. 

“Never,” he insisted in a low whisper, “never, I would always—”

_“Rey?”_

Kaydel was neatly tucking her gloves into her handbag. She probably only saw Rey’s stance, nearly folded over, Ben delicately holding her up.

“There’s a few people who wanted to say hello to you. But I can…” she gestured between them, “...while you two figure this out.”

So it was no secret to Kaydel. Once Rey had imagined Catherine’s sister would be a difficult party to explain her feelings to. 

But Kaydel seemed caught up, and not at all angry. Just weary in the face of this very emotional private conversation for normal reasons. 

Ben was clinging onto her like she was a lifeline. He cleared his throat and took a step back.

“Give me a moment?” Rey asked Kaydel, and it seemed like a neatly folded conclusion, to only need a moment.

Kaydel nodded and slipped back out to the party.

She touched Ben’s cheek gently with her palm. He let her. Leaning into her touch.

His face was ageless, old and young, because she had known it forever.

She knew what she wanted. And she’d carry Luke’s curse inside her forever if she had to. She knew why she tore herself away. Living with it scared her, and if she didn’t leave him then, she never would have. 

It was worth pain to be with Ben. That was something she knew even when she was small. It was worth this. Worth love. 

“We’ve been letting each other go for far too long. I don’t think that’s what we were meant to learn if we keep coming back to each other like this.”

Ben leaned down and kissed her gently on her lips. Quick. She’d think of it as her second kiss, since their first was an endless trail that finished with him inside her on the moor. It certainly didn’t leave her skin long enough to consider it more than one. 

This one was singular and brief. 

“Please let me be careful with us,” she wheezed helplessly as he pressed a gentle kiss to her brow, “please let us do it right this time.”

“And not burn through each other like we would have done years ago?”

She blinked up at him. Wondering how he could understand her fear, when he didn’t see his family voice those same fears, didn’t know what they did.

He smiled sadly at her.

“We won’t. Or we will. But we’ve lived long enough without each other. Go to the party, Rey. I need a moment,” he took the square of silk out of his suit pocket and shyly dotted his eye. “But once I’m back out there for you, good luck ever getting rid of me.” 

* * *

  
  


Rey had a partner for every song on the dance floor. 

Not all of them were Ben. Some were old friends from the Dales, characters and faces she had placed in the form of lines in books, real again and wanting to joke with her once more. 

But most of all was Ben. Her partner. So beautiful it hurt her. 

She might not have survived his first wedding, been sick with grief, or perhaps the gentleness that Catherine had taught him would have made her love stop hurting her. 

These things couldn’t be known about the past, the ones that didn’t happen, the _maybes._ It was time to let them die or else sacrifice her entire future. She had written a series of maybes: all of them _maybe if they could be forgiven,_ without trying once to make it real.

Now, what was real was how Ben kept her dizzy with happiness under the orbit of his hand when he twirled her.

“I’d like for you to come home with me—”

She blushed and tucked her head to one side of his shoulders as they danced.

“—and I’d like to make love to you when we get there.”

Rey closed her eyes as he turned her around the floor and tried not to wobble. 

“Was I too rough? Was that why you ran? I can be gentle,” Ben chuckled humorlessly, “if you’d ever let me be gentle.”

She couldn’t speak. His coaxing tone. He was hurt by her escape, but he didn’t seem to know she would have crawled back to the Dales with one call from him sounding like that.

He plucked teasingly at the bow knotted at her spine. 

“I could use this to tie you so you down so you’d let me. And I wouldn’t truly start for hours, I’ll be so soft with you, until you roll like clay between my fingers. And then I’ll make love to you.”

Her shiver couldn’t be ignored with their bodies so close. 

“If you’re cold,” he drawled dangerously in her ear, “I’ll lend you another sweater.”

Her shiver turned into something fuller. It was a full-body seize that startled the wife of the elderly couple dancing beside them. The old woman reached for Rey’s elbow because it was clear she thought the author was about the faint. Once finding her balance, she smiled awkwardly at them and waved off concern while Ben held onto her like the most capable partner in the world. 

“There now, come here. It’s only fun for so long when you’re this frightened of me.”

He secured her back to his chest. Returning felt better. Warmer. More solid. She wanted to crush up against him. 

“I sleep in your sweater every night,” she admitted, biting her lip raw.

“Little fool,” his hand on her back was cradling her to his broad chest, holding her up when her knees felt weak, “I’ll sleep with you every night.”

  
  


* * *

“I believe in some blending of hope and sunshine sweetening the worst lots. I believe that this life is not all; neither the beginning nor the end. I believe while I tremble; I trust while I weep.”

Charlotte Bronte, _Villette_


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please check amended tags! A future, very wanted pregnancy is discussed in this chapter, and they work on having a kid together, but unconfirmed results ;)

_ Now it's found us _

_ Like I have found you _

_ I don't want to run _

_ Just overwhelm me _

* * *

Rey gasped when the door to her hotel room swung open. 

It was  _ so _ late. If she had not left the dance floor when she had, she would have fallen asleep on it. 

Now her shoes were kicked off, one having hit unceremoniously against the wardrobe in the room, left in a heap on the floor. Her blue dress had made it over the back of a chair after she stripped it off. And she had only just gotten her body into bed, scribbling some murky final thoughts in her notebook when the door blew wide open. 

Ben waltzed casually in, his jacket folded over his elbow.

“Don’t blame Kaydel,” he said at first in the wake of her shock, “I stole the keys from her.”

And he twirled them in his hand as evidence.

_ “Ben.” _

Rey settled deeper into the mattress, the coverlet pulled modestly up over her chest as an instinctual reaction to intrusion. He closed the door behind him, so the layer of blanket between them felt superseded in enclosing them privately. She still kept them there. 

Maybe so he wouldn’t see her breathing so hard in only her slip.

In the farmhouse, it was so much his, it was so much  _ them, _ that having Ben so near to her in a bed was no great stretch of the imagination. This was a room she paid for as a single woman. 

And there was a man in it now. 

She secretly quite liked this current feature. Her thighs rubbed softly together and the muscles tensed, as if tightening a fishing line that would bring him closer. 

This alchemy worked as he took a daring step closer.

“I said I’d come round in the morning.”

He nodded at her, pocketing the keys. 

“Breakfast,” he confirmed, not taking his eyes from her as he stepped closer to her bed. 

She had begged off of going home to the farm with him tonight: for she was in terrible danger of never leaving, and Poe had threatened to get the police involved if she wasn’t back on schedule. 

If he tied her up with her ribbons, she wouldn’t try very hard to escape.

Ben had seemed understanding, if unhappy with this request, while practically holding her in order to stand up during their final dance at Rose’s wedding. 

“Perhaps I’m early,” he suggested. 

“Perhaps you forgot to kiss me goodnight.”

He had; but not  _ properly.  _

He kissed her like a gentleman at the foot of the stairs after he walked both Rey and his sister-in-law home. Kaydel was at the front desk, pretending not to watch, but behind his back, she cast an overjoyed smile at Rey when he gave her the most chaste kiss possible. 

He stood proudly at the foot of her bed with his hands in his trouser pockets. At some point he had tossed his suit jacket over her dress on the chair.

“Kaydel is watching the animals in the morning. But I do not like to be gone from them long. She doesn’t care for them, even when she helps me. But she did—” Ben looked down at his hands, “—she did offer to watch over them again in the event I would be on a honeymoon soon.”

“Perhaps incentive,” Rey couldn’t help but tease in a whisper.

Under the coverlet, her legs splayed open. 

Ben’s knee sank onto the mattress. Before long, he had crawled to fill the space she had made for him to fit. Hovering over with his clothes on. 

She lay back and let him drift over her like a cloud. 

There was the same cloud-gazing serenity in her eyes when he lowered himself down to give her a kiss. 

The blanket was still up to her chest but it felt terribly naughty that way with him lying against her open legs. 

It was like the kiss pulled a confession from him:

“I was saving it for when you returned to London.”

She smiled and stroked her hand down the side of his face. 

“I only get one?”

A sadness crossed his eyes.

“Only one that’s the first.”

Her heart shuddered in her chest when she realized they were thinking of a different goodbye. One he never gave.

He touched her lips pensively with the tip of his finger. 

“I thought about it all summer when I first heard you’d leave us. I saved it...and I was too afraid. And then you were gone.”

He blinked at the memory, glancing up at her. 

“Every time I looked at you my heart sped up so fast and I couldn’t  _ think.” _

She swallowed.

“So you ran.”

Ben looked ashamed. Raw, open, and honest. She saw him as a boy, herself as a girl, they had moved through time to speak to each other again. 

“I couldn’t give you the proper goodbye,” he bowed his head to her chest and she cradled it there. “So I—”

He had not given her one at all. And started the pattern she had repeated months ago when she ran off to the train station with his sweater on her body and his spend inside of it.

“Ben,” she stroked his hair. “If you only get one, why do you think I saved my chance for when I saw you again?”

It was that easy to move on. It was that easy to clear away this pain: the death of it all, the forgotten youth, the mistakes. 

Always loving him had not been a trap. 

When she treated it properly: it set her free. 

In some ways they were powerless as children. And yet together, they were powerful. For this choice he had made all those years ago made her weep harder than anything the Skywalkers had done to tear them apart. 

No adult could fix this. Just them.

Despite her exhaustion after the festivities and demurring when she was on her feet on the dance floor, they made love in that bed. Starting before the tears were over but not because they had begun. 

They quickly recovered from the pretense that Ben was there for anything else other than to return to her body. 

Already, only on her second time, it was not treated as the most terrifying thing Rey had never done. Or, until recently, had never done enough of. After gently kissing her tears, Ben leaned off of her and peeled back the covers. He was in bed with her just quickly enough for them to know what they were doing before they had time to question what they were doing. 

“Please, tell me, was I too rough last time?”

Rey’s eyes fluttered open as he slowed his pace. All she could think about was the stretch of him inside the heat of herself. How it was surprisingly wet, pleasantly so, surprisingly pleasant. 

“What a time to ask.”

She closed her eyes again and thought of the storm of him amongst her body on the moors. She didn’t remember pain. But it was much more intense. Like he was wielding herself in a battle with her. She wielded hers.

She remembered how hard her heart was beating then. Like she was alive again.

Like now.

Her silence frightened him. He held her tighter.

“This may sound contrary to our history: but I don’t like hurting you.”

His expression was desperate. 

She clutched his shoulders and shook her head. Her hips pushed closer to him, as he had halted on a thrust that had him half-inside, the head of him nudging somewhere pleasant, but not at all filling her properly. 

“You aren’t hurting me, love,” she said finally, threading her hands in his hair and urging him to move against her. He sighed into her touch. So soft. Not gentle, but  _ gentled. _ “Even if you were, I’d just want you to hurt me again. Over and over.”

This was a remarkable cure for crying. Her thighs shuddered around his hips. He was so agile and bare against her, moving carefully, both of them finally brave enough to handle each other delicately. That was always scarier than their childhood roughness. 

“I forgot to tell you how beautiful you looked tonight.”

She laughed with her eyes closed, a smile forming across her face even when she was in darkness.

“Rey,” his fingers cupped her chin. “I meant to say it when you told me I looked handsome. I was prepared to see it before you even came down. Though not prepared enough, because I didn’t.”

Her body shuddered with the image of herself pleasantly disrupted by his presence. Like a bird touching down on the surface of a glass-still lake. 

The former spinster clothes. The glasses she wore to read. The hours holding herself rigid so Poe (who she now knew for certain had no interest) would not think about her any other way than professionally.

Of course that changed for him.

She had never wanted to be seen without his eyes.

* * *

Ben said goodbye to Rey at the train station with a kiss that prompted whistles. 

“I could find a way to belong in London,” he set her hat on her head, looking down at her with careful consideration. Trying the offer out for the first time, “if it’s what you wanted.”

Her heart sank. He loved his farm. She knew it. 

“No,” Rey shook her head up at him, straightening the hat he had placed on crooked. “You belong here.”

There was a sad line to his mouth until she persisted:

“I belong here too.”

He had worried aloud to her that he needed to prove he could let her go. So he did, that morning, after spending every hour possible together in the Dales her schedule allowed. 

She did phone Poe to say she was taking a later train. There wasn’t much he could do about it once she hung up. 

She had needed to prove she would come back to stay. 

Here’s what she did:

She went back to London and packed up her flat the minute she walked through the door. She spent every waking hour working on her book. She answered the telephone only to Ben. 

Once, she stayed at her typewriter as she kept the phone to her ear, and he dictated. 

_ “Take everything off, sit in your chair. Tell your stories of me, especially the bad ones. Spare no detail, since it’s impossible for you to miss them. I can just see you naked at your desk, your nipples hard enough to tap on the keys for me…” _

She had thought she’d always had his voice in London, carried with her, held close so as not to fall out of her grasp when she was knocked against by a stranger in the crowded streets. But having Ben’s voice with her in London had her soaring with every step, enough to know she’d miss it. 

A little bit. 

Just as she wasn’t herself without the Dales, she found she wasn’t herself without London. She mourned it because she had loved it well. But it wasn’t home.

The instant Poe relented that her edits could be completed by telephone and post she was on her way back. 

She telephoned Ben from Paddington Station with her bags in hand to inform him that she would be returning and was never to leave, and to perhaps dust before she arrived. 

When she did, he had done her one better, and set up a typewriter and desk in the attic for her. A room waiting for her to stay forever.

* * *

The longer she spent with Ben, the less she was angry with Luke. 

She could look at what he did as a wrong and a wound and a violent thing. But it was simply looking at a scar on her body that had since healed before she learned how it got there. Any reasonable person would want that question answered: but it wasn’t any more useful to know now that she did. 

It just made her worry the flesh around the wound a little less. 

What she learned about Luke wouldn’t break her because she finally had time to learn about Ben. 

There was fleeting talk of a wedding. Kaydel mostly mentioning it for trouble’s sake. Rey was not averse to the idea. They talked about it a few times.

Though one afternoon she took a sad look at the hut in the distance as they walked past the Abbey and clutched Ben’s hand a little tighter when he asked if she’d like to marry him. 

It was not his proposal. They simply liked to talk about it as adults.

“And who will give me away?” she said tightly, “Luke?”

If he did not know then why this hurt her so badly, she wouldn’t be able to tell the difference with how urgently he soothed that ache in the moment. 

In the moment he pressed a furious kiss to her brow as the winds tossed around them. Her skirt fluttering and their hair whipping each other’s cheeks.

And that evening, when the sun was set and she hesitated in the kitchen to make dinner without his help, he did not come home. 

She had checked the barn herself this time: whenever he was stolen away, he was there amongst his chickens and cows and usually speaking to them far too animatedly. If ever a detail was mourned for being left out of a story, she did wish the tender way Ben spoke to animals that she only discovered in adulthood painted how she saw him as she wrote. But he was not in the barn that night.

Kaydel never saw Ben without insisting on saying hello to Rey, so he was not out repairing a leaky faucet in the hotel of running an errand Rey lent him out freely. 

She knew in a reasonable way where he was: but reason sometimes is harder to believe. 

Ben came in when the sky was black, his skin sweaty and his body tired, and she poured him a drink in silence. 

He sat at the table in silence. The whole house was silent. 

But he came back.

Rey supposed he couldn’t answer a question she didn’t ask, so she went to his side and placed her hands on his shoulder, pressing her brow to his temple.

“What did you say to him?”

Her voice was quiet but so was this house. She liked the quiet, usually. She imagined how much easier it would have been to write here. How many dozens more books she could have produced in this quiet. How much more joy could have grown from the softness of this earth: instead of her despair ricocheting off of jagged stone walls.

“I asked him why I lost you again merely an hour after you came to see him,” he took a sip from his drink. “He has a complicated relationship with the truth: but the old bastard never lies outright.”

She took a shaky breath.

“I’m sorry.”

He shrugged: her body unsettled by the motion because she was leaning on the very shoulder he raised. 

“I suppose I assumed it was something very horrible he told you about me and you believed him. I could never imagine he’d admit any fault between us. Why didn’t you tell me?”

Her teeth dug into her lip and she shook her head.

“He was the last of your family.”

Ben snorted and slipped an arm around her waist, seeming to dismiss the sadness of the statement by pulling her close. 

“What about you? What about Kay? When my family is too difficult, I am perfectly capable of finding my own.”

She blinked at him, jarred by his easy proximity. How he would still want to hold her when she had hidden her reasons for leaving him, hidden what his uncle had done to them, when he should have hated her for believing Luke?

He said this like he chose her: with Rey, and Ben, there was never a choice. Or the choice was him or nothing, complete removal or complete consumption.

Ben could feel her thinking and shook his head, pulling Rey to sit in his lap. His body was hard and still wired, but he tried to use it to warm and comfort her. 

_ Catherine.  _

Ben went elsewhere when he felt rejected. Not wanted. Turned his back on his pain. Rey went away, but only in that it was like she didn’t exist until the wrong was righted again. If he was more like Rey, there’d never have been Catherine. A kind person who loved him and who he loved. 

Her way had turned loss into loneliness. His turned it into strength. 

Rey swallowed and pressed her brow to his.

“Tell me he apologized to you.”

Ben laughed softly, a breath sliding down the slim space between their bodies. 

“My darling optimist,” he pressed a kiss to her lips, “you showed up here convinced after all these years that I would still be saved by you. Succeeding where he failed. You might have been right about that. Keep hoping, for our sakes, because I would hate for you to ever become sensible.”

Rey kissed him until his shoulders went soft with calm. She had come back with a secret she had thought was enough to break them. 

“I only hope,” she wet her lips, for this could harm more than it healed, as she had no claims on her past, “that when Luke comes to our wedding: he is more miserable than we would be now at a wedding where one of us married someone else.”

Ben smiled and kissed her again.

“I'm sorry to tell you he won't be. He'd even managed a smile when I informed him that was my same intention.”

This misplaced blessing made Rey shake with a sob. He held her and soothed her, and told her how soon it would be that she saw it for herself.

Now she gave herself to him. That was all that mattered.

* * *

Ben insisted he didn’t read the final book. He didn’t peek at the pages. He didn’t press her for details when she worried aloud about the scene Poe wanted to change. She never caught him eavesdropping while she argued with her editor on the phone. He seemed so innocently oblivious as the release came near and Rey became more and more fearful of the end.

When she had come back from London, he had set up a typewriter in the attic for her at a small desk under the window. She would type away on her edits and he would bring her tea and kisses every few hours as she worked. 

She knew for sure this was true when she knew the moment he finished the book. He padded up to the attic with it hanging half-shut between his fingers.

He stared at her in the doorway while she brushed her hair for bed. 

She liked to work here, even with the new bed just a few feet over. Despite having full range of the house she had a soft spot for her childhood home, and for her years living unmarried having all of her things in one manageable flat. It helped keep the ghosts away to have a space that felt like there, instead of filling Han and Leia’s room or where he slept when he was married.

Ben set the book aside on her desk. She had never seen him reading it, but he spent hours outside while she answered letters and worked on her new ideas. It was a well-worn copy for such a new book. 

Rey waited in a nervous, tense silence as he neared the bed she sat upon. Frozen in place. As satisfied as she felt when it was over, she was frightened now. Would he be angry?

Rey had lived like something was about to drop down on all their heads and destroy everything since she was a little girl. 

He was her shelter. 

Ben sat next to her on the bed, an intelligent furrow to his brow like he was puzzling over a piece of art that he liked before he understood. Awaiting his opinion on the book was killing her before she even knew it. 

His eyes moved rapidly like they were still flipping over pages. 

He took a strand of her freshly-brushed hair in his fingers and curled it around his knuckle. 

The only indication he gave her at first was a small, sad smile of approval. It was what was in his eyes that soothed her. 

He was proud of her no matter how it ended.

“I see it, now that it’s all finished.”

She understood him completely. This story was half of herself, had spanned half her life, but there was relief in it's closing. She had once clung to it as the only place they could be together because it had been. 

Ben had always preferred the truth between them; so this was as kind a reaction as she could have hoped for. 

Then she glanced down at his feet.

"Ben, love," she touched his cheek lightly but scoldingly, "your socks don't match."

He followed her eyes as if shocked, but a warm smile spread across his face that she finally decided to play.

He kissed her neatly on the lips and they didn’t need to speak of it again. 

Rey had passed the point in her life where she was writing for Ben to read. When the only way to reach him was dropping a bomb over their entire history.

What’s more exciting was writing tomorrow together.

* * *

Ben had liked being married. 

He had liked being  _ loved, _ he was good at it: from the flowers he brought in from outside to the thoughtful kisses he consecrated her with. Rey found herself thanking Catherine in her prayers. For keeping him safe after the war as the Solos had kept Rey safe during it. People left things to each other that could not be taken away. Stories. Sweaters. Recipes for roast chicken. 

Kaydel taught her the recipe, both of them laughing in the kitchen as it was hit from all sides with beautiful sunlight. Ben watched them with his careful smile. They crunched on the pickles that Rey was never able to find in London, the quiet Yank bringing things into this house in the Dales you’d never be able to find elsewhere and Ben continuing the supply with grave secrecy. 

The place could stay magical in some ways even without him there.

She learned more about all the time that she missed and found that the place she had longed for had never been the same after she left. And not even because of her absence alone. 

Han was sick for a long time before the end. Longer than anyone knew. His soft footsteps and his hours pouring over newspapers recounting battles he’d never see: this was not just that he lacked the interest or the duty to fight in this war. 

His body was not that of a soldier. 

The Solo house blanketed this quiet embarrassment for many years, taking in a young girl to help the efforts in a way that was obvious, Leia’s genius and Han’s intimate network of friends helping in ways that were less so. 

Ben told her, carefully, so not to hurt her, that the Dales were not a fairy tale after she left them. They weren’t magical to him, with his first ever friend actually able to put up with him coming from far away and then leaving him alone, and his father growing ill, and his mother fraying as she rebuilt half of Europe with only a telephone and radio. He sounded half embarrassed that he couldn’t hold that place together for her to come back to. As if what she couldn’t see was a course of his shame. 

Rey took his hand when he explained how she would not have found much happiness when she came home from school. He would not have had a good, selfless love in his heart. He’d have needed her far too much, it burned through him. 

“I was a boy when you left,” on another of their walks, he looked out across the hills as the sun set around them, frost kissing his lips as the night chill began to veil their skin, “I thought I was a man then, but I was just a boy. I had terrible thoughts.”

She knew of the blackness of his soul. But now that it was peeled back and shared, she supposed she should examine how near to danger she came.

“What kind of thoughts?”

He glanced at her with a look of regret.

“I wanted you. I pictured you’d come back and I’d have you begging underneath me on the moors, all my love poured into you, my hate too. You were the subject of the first of my lust. Confused. Bitter. Selfish. When you finally came back to me and I had you before any other man, in the moss and wild for me like I had imagined—I thought you were here to curse me. To haunt me for the things I wished for.”

She half-laughed, his confession barely fazing her. So he had wanted to fuck her before he wanted to make love to her. So he was a boy before he was a gentleman.

She would have him as he was, for always.

“Things you wished for?” she squeezed his hand at his startled expression, he clearly had not anticipated this. “Pleasure? Affection? Companionship?”

He had no answer: but turned his eyes back to the scenery. There was a calm in how he lifted his eyes and let them soar that she knew he felt her forgiveness, but didn’t want to feel it himself just yet.

Her expression grew wistful as she brought her cold fingers to his cheeks. “Luke wasn’t right about you if he meant we must stay apart forever. We did have a lot to learn before we could be good to each other, Ben Solo. I don’t hate you for before you learned. Or who taught you.”

They knew who taught him. She was a wonderful person.

He was quiet for the remainder of the day. But they had quiet days like that. There were spaces in the house that would never be filled by the same souls. Those souls carried pieces of love that were given and could not be taken back. That silence was sacred between them: the two souls left living. 

Each the place that held love with faith. 

He didn’t speak until that evening, in their bed in the attic, when they had all well proceeded even in silence an invitation their bodies refused to deny. 

He was inside her, the hard length of himself, yet held in her body softly. They rocked together as a gentle rain pattered against the roof. 

By now whenever there was thunder, it was a mere flinch at the sound. A wince instead of complete paralyzation. The shock absorbed into his body as his abdomen strained against hers.

“Rey.”

It was said as a question. Her head was tossing against the pillow in pleasure, a cry half-out her throat when he spoke her name. 

She lifted her neck to see his eyes. 

“Yes?”

His hips pumped shallowly inside her. His head bowed to kiss across her chest. She was little there. It wasn’t the fashion, it was considered unwomanly, but the things that weren’t readily available during the war perhaps could have filled her out in a way that she just wasn’t. 

He adored her chest. Spoke soft words to it, her trembling breasts, made her mouth apologize for how mad they drove him. 

His hair hung down over his face as he hovered over her. Raised up, having flinched back for a moment as if burned by his own thoughts.

She thought of him fleeing to the moors because he had wanted to kiss her goodbye but was too frightened and could not see her at all. 

Her thighs tightened around his hips. Cradling him inside.

He cleared his throat and bore his hips down so they were locked tightly against each other.

“Take my child.”

Rey arched underneath him and a cry soared from her throat. 

He hadn’t come for her yet. But she did for him. Right at that moment. At his lovely request. 

He held his body rigid as she writhed like a wild thing underneath him, half-mad with pleasure and excitement. 

“Please,” he added on a breath, a gasp escaping him when her cunt rippled around him to claim him. “Can we—?”

He groaned instead of ending his thought, seemingly attempting to keep himself under control.

It was not in the sins that were done to them where their lives rested. It was in the space between each other that they made smaller and smaller each day. 

“Please Ben,” she whispered in breathy, perfect happiness, “give me your child.”

* * *

_ The Old Knight grunted with satisfaction: she had passed his test with her patience and nerve.  _

_ Patience and nerve, however, were far from her mind when she thought of Ben, alone at the base of the stone steps. He could not go on to complete this journey. He sent her to finish it as her own. _

_ Rey took a breath and thought of everything good in him, and the test he had failed.  _

_ For Rey of the Dales, it said much more about the test than it did about Ben. _

_ “You have learned your final lesson. You will take my name and become a Knight in my stead. Return to me my sword.” _

_ He had made her wait so long for her destiny. _

_ She gripped the weapon she had worked so hard to earn. She had finally begun to feel she deserved it. _

_ If she had to give it back to where it came from, then had she ever deserved it at all? _

_ She took back the sword and devised her plan to return it to Ben. _

_ This was not her destiny. It was not where she belonged. It was not in the past with a long-dead Knight and his legacy. Not another war.  _

_ It was in the return to the earth so sweet to explore the world together.  _

_ It rested with Ben’s next heartbeat, and her own, and the silence between them as they waited together for their hearts to beat again. _

* * *

“There is only one page left to write on. I will fill it with words of only one syllable. I love. I have loved. I will love.” 

Dodie Smith, I Capture The Castle. 

  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for everyone reading this very sad story! This will always be my chaotic quarantine story. I've really enjoyed this place, and doing Reylo Wuthering Heights, and sharing it with you. 
> 
> The AU where thunder-fearing Rey visits Ben on the one weekend there are 36 thunderstorms.

**Author's Note:**

> So this was a twitter prompt originally: @Hissterically had two perfect images that ended up becoming this story. It was supposed to be a one-shot. It's far from done: but the document is currently 37 pages. Wish me luck.


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